[mpeg-OTspec] Armenian East-West Distinctions

[John Hopkins]

John,

Your'e making sense to me. We still need OT language tag support,
regardless of ISO support. There is always the IANA variant tags if you are
using BCP-47. Thanks.

John D. Hopkins


On Wed, Jul 10, 2013 at 11:59 AM, John Hudson <john at tiro.ca> wrote:

> **
>
>
> On 10/07/13 10:01 AM, Andrew Glass (WINDOWS) wrote:
>
> > There are a couple of options here: make a new language tag or make a
> > new script tag. In principle, the language is the same, so it is not
> > appropriate to make a new language tag – I believe that ISO 639-3
> > registration authority would reject the request. The differences you
> > refer to are in the orthography, and so a script difference is
> > appropriate. There is precedent for script variants to be given distinct
> > script codes within ISO 15924. See for example Syriac, Han, and Latin:
>
> Yes, this makes sense in the context of ISO 639-3 and ISO 15924, but not
> in the context of OpenType language system tags, I think. The convention
> there has always been to make orthographic distinctions at the language
> system tag level, and to reserve the script tag to reference Unicode
> scripts. This is what enables OTL engines to make decisions about script
> tag based on character codes in the text, and fonts to provide
> orthographic variation based on language system tagging. This is also,
> of course, why mapping OTL language system tags to ISO 639 document
> language tags will always remain hit-and-miss: they record different
> kinds of information (which is why, sensibly, CSS3 provides for OTL
> language system tagging independent of text language tagging).
>
> In the case of East vs West Armenian, it does look like ISO conventions
> would favour a script tag distinction. But that doesn't get us any
> closer to being able to affect orthographic distinctions within OpenType
> glyph processing, since regardless of script tag the Unicode script is
> the same, and OTL language system tag is the normal place to capture
> orthographic distinctions within a script.
>
> JH
>
> --
>
> Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com
> Gulf Islands, BC tiro at tiro.com
>
> The criminologist's definition of 'public order
> crimes' comes perilously close to the historian's
> description of 'working-class leisure-time activity.'
> - Sidney Harring, _Policing a Class Society_
>
>  
>
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