Thu Aug 8 09:59:57 1996

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Date: Thu, 8 Aug 1996 09:58:09 -0400 (EDT)
From: "James R. Adair" 
To: tc-list@scholar.cc.emory.edu
Subject: Re: TC articles display Greek & Hebrew
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On Thu, 8 Aug 1996, Stephen C Carlson wrote:

(I wrote:)
> >The important thing to remember is that the
> >character maps must match.
> 
> Is the SPIonic font mapping unique, or did it borrow it from another
> font?  I'm thinking of the Silver Mountain Software fonts and other
> packages.  As far as I can understand the behavior of the HTML
>  tag, one is allowed to specify multiple font faces to be
> tried, e.g., Mh=nin a)ei/de qea/.
> But even that trick will only work if the character maps are identical.

Right.  The face attribute allows you to specify up to three fonts to try 
loading, but they must have identical character maps to display 
properly.  We had two primary goals in mind when we designed our fonts: 
ease of use by scholars in the field (that's why we based our fonts on the 
TLG and Michigan-Claremont standard encoding schemes) and compatibility 
between PC and Mac platforms.  Our initial inclination was to take an 
existing, popular font and use the same character map, but there were two 
problems.  First, as far as I can tell, there is no single Greek font, 
for example, that is used by a majority of people, and since the 
character maps vary among the various popular fonts, picking a standard 
would have been arbitrary.  Second, and more importantly, we wanted to 
create fonts that would work on both PCs and Macs.  Because of 
differences between the two platforms, that meant that we restricted 
ourselves to using the characters between 32 and 127 (i.e., ASCII).  
Since none of the fonts I knew about did this, we decided to create our own.

> >                            If anyone runs across characters that don't 
> >display properly (particularly on the screen, but also in print) in 
> >either 10 or 12 point size, I would appreciate hearing about it.  I have 
> >in mind characters that are unrecognizable or just plain wrong, but I'll 
> >be glad to at least consider improving particularly ugly letters.
> 
> All I can remember offhand is that the dagesh in the beth is a bit off-
> center, but that may be due to fit the narrower gimel.

We do have more than one character for a single diacritical in our fonts
(e.g., we have four different dageshes), but we don't have as many as most
commercial fonts do, so positioning of breathing marks, accents, and vowel
points may not be as nice in our fonts.  Again, the reasons for this go
back to our desire for ease of use and our self-imposed limitation on
using only valid ASCII characters.  What users should do is to try the
diacritical characters in different combinations to see what looks best to
them.  I have tried to help by specifying that a breathing mark, for
example, is designed for either narrow or wide characters.  I plan to go
back to the readme file and specify what I mean by narrow and wide, but
for Greek, wide vowels are alpha and omega, and all the other vowels (and
rho) are considered narrow.

Jimmy Adair
Manager of Information Technology Services, Scholars Press
    and
Managing Editor of TELA, the Scholars Press World Wide Web Site
---------------> http://scholar.cc.emory.edu <-----------------

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