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Re: Comments on 0.56

At 12:07 PM 98/01/13 -0500, bbeeton wrote:

>    There has been a very long discussion about dotlessj on tex-fonts 
>    last year, but without any real conclusion IIRC.

I think the overall view was that dotlessj is not a character in its own right
since it is not used in any language.  My argument that it forms the basis
for several accented characters like jcircumflex was dismissed because
jcircumflex is the combination of the *character* j and the *character*
circumflex accent.  The fact that it is constructed typographically from the
*glyph* dotlessj and the *glyph* circumflex accent is - according to the
purist - irrelevant, since UNICODE is supposed to be a *character*
standard not a *glyph* standard (see many pages of amusing attempts
to come to grips with the difference and the many-to-many
relationship between characters and glyphs on the UNICODE web site).

However, since Apple, Adobe, Microsoft and Monotype are now in effect
using UNICODE as a glyph standard, there may be a lot of pressure to let
in more and more such useful glyphs (fortunately, we at least
have the 5 f-ligatures now!)

>the undotted j will shortly be submitted to the unicode consortium and
>the iso wg2 working group for assignment of a code.  the group doing
>this will have the weight of several major technical publishers and
>scientific societies behind it.  i'm hoping for a successful conclusion
>but can't, of course, promise.

>if unicode agrees, then we can begin to work on adobe and other font
>vendors.

If you can give me any additional information on this, I can try and inject
this into the `corporate private use area' group.  I have been lobbying them
for a couple of years on behalf of dotlessj, but was a lone voice in the
wilderness :-)

Regards, Berthold.

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