Please note that I am replying only to gtk-i18n-list which is the
only one of the list of addressees that I am currently subscribed
to. Please feel free to forward the message if you should choose
to.
On Tue, 27 Sep 2005 Edward H.Trager wrote :
[...]
>... regarding a proposal for an improved font selection drop-down
>widget that would be ideal for use in professional-quality Open
>Source word processing, desktop publishing, and graphic design
>programs such as OpenOffice.org, Gimp, Inkscape, and similar
>programs.
Sorry for the delay in the follow-up: I have been travelling, and
replying to email has not been easy. I like your proposal very much.
There are a couple more additions for Indic scripts that I would like
to propose:
1. Indic scripts should have a sub-classification below the top-level
one as you have proposed for Chinese, for example. There are two
ways in which this could be done; the first being by the script,
and the second by the encoding. Script-based classification
might be needed as there are a wide variety of scripts, and people
can often read only one or two. Moreover, it is possible for a
language, e.g. Punjabi, to have more than one script.
Classification by encoding is required for similar reasons as for
the Chinese scripts: a wide number of fonts are in use where the
Indian language characters are placed in the ASCII or basic Latin
areas. Of course, this practice is wrong and should not be
encouraged in this day and age, but the fact remains that these
legacy fonts dominate over Unicode fonts in number and quality.
2. If the encoding is wrong as discussed above, the name of the font
becomes meaningless in both English and the Unicode codepoins in
the native language. This could probably be addressed by the font
alias scheme discussed in your XML schema for the font selection
menu.
Regards,
Gora