Characters and glyphs - was Re: [I18n]bdftruncate again ;)

[Dr Andrew C Aitchison <A dot C dot Aitchison at dpmms dot cam dot ac dot uk>]

On Thu, 24 Jan 2002, Brian Stell wrote:

> Unicode is designed to be a character set and encoding
> but not a glyph encoding. For example the character 'A'
> has one charset (and encoding) point but could have a
> bold glyph, italic glyph, or san-serif glyph if a font
> so wished.

A simpler example is that 'A' and 'a' are the same character, but 
different glyphs. If Unicode was being even-handed, it would
include one but not both of these glyphs, and application software
would have to calculate which glyph to use each time the character
was drawn.

This example shows how biased Unicode is towards Latin characters.

-- 
Dr. Andrew C. Aitchison		Computer Officer, DPMMS, Cambridge
A dot C dot Aitchison at dpmms dot cam dot ac dot uk	http://www.dpmms.cam.ac.uk/~werdna