Re: Numeric shaping in Pango

[Jungshik Shin <jshin mailaps org>]

On Sun, 21 Sep 2003, Lina Kemmel wrote:

> > Pango won't convert European digits to any other kind
> > automatically. There are no rules anywhere (in Unicode for
> > example) that say that should be done.
>
> Section 13.3 of http://www.unicode.org/book/ch13.pdf says:

  It's section 15.4 (p. 395) in Unicode 4.0 if anyone is wondering.
>
> "... the European digits (U+0030...U+0039) should be depicted
> using glyphs that represent the nominal digits shapes shown
> in the code tables for these glyphs. This state (nominal) is
> the default state in the absence of any numeric shape
> selector..." [deprecated, though] "...or a higher-level
> protocol".

  Without any agreement in advance,  numeric shape selectors
would be almost useless (although a locale based selection might be
possible), which is why I guess they were deprecated. Anyway, I believe
blindly replacing [U+0030, U+0039] with other glyphs
without any indication of the authorial intent (e.g. enclosing them with
a pair of numeric shape selectors) is a bad idea. If they want [U+0660, U+0669]
or digits defined in several Indic script blocks, they could just them directly.

  Jungshik