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Having different displays for different markets is exactly what Unicode allows for: you specify the intended symbol, and then it's localised in the font you cho
by dmurray 6y ago
Having different displays for different markets is exactly what Unicode allows for: you specify the intended symbol, and then it's localised in the font you choose. An example from the proposal is "flat dry when wet, European variant has two bars, US and Canadian variant has three bars".
A glyph in one font may look confusingly similar to a completely different glyph in another font (or the same font). If you don't have a digital version you then have to rely on context clues. You can quite reliably tell if a given C is LATIN CAPITAL LETTER C or CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER ES, by assessing the surrounding text and the medium to see if the author was most likely writing for a Russian or an English audience.
Of course, it's possible that manufacturers currently mix contexts confusingly. In that case, having each one draw from a single Unicode palette should help.
- leoedin 6y agoAre fonts consistently localised? What happens if the pool of people who use a font (eg Arial) contain multiple washing symbol regions? Do you spin up a new, localised font for every country?
- TheRealPomax 6y agoNo, you simply rely on your tooling, which should allow you to set the locale (or "script", which is the OpenType term for it) for your content. Thankfully, a lot of tooling designed to present text to a human (From Word to LaTeX to HTML) already have ways to do this, so folks writing textile documentation will now be able to take advantage of this, too.
- grishka 6y agoThis whole "is it Cyrillic or Latin" confusion sometimes does happen IRL. There's an insurance company that has its logo in all capitals: PECO. For most of my life I've always read it as Latin. But at some point I heard it in a TV commercial and they said it as "reso". Yikes. Also РОСНАНО. It's not "pochaho", it's "rosnano". The reverse is also true: there's a "Bona Capona" restaurant but its logo uses a typeface that makes it tempting to read it as "Vopa Saropa".
- aasasd 6y agoWell thankfully the rest of the world aren't subjected to the Cyrillic-Latin confusion, because it's only inside the country that Russian companies use the mix of Cyrillic and Latin... And specifically English, while a lot of people over twenty-five can't pronounce or read English.
- dmurray 6y agoAnyone who needs to deal with the language formerly known as Serbo-Croat might disagree.
- aasasd 6y agoAh, well, I should've written ‘Russian-Latin confusion’—forgot about the alphabet changeovers. But at least I'm told that: > It can be written in Serbian Cyrillic or Gaj's Latin alphabet, whose thirty letters mutually map one-to-one, and the orthography is highly phonemic in all standards. Though digraphs spoil the clarity somewhat. Which reminded me that I should check what Kazakhstan is doing to its language. They seem to at least have avoided the eldritch monstrosity of Polish with ‘Grzegorz Brzęczyszczykiewicz’ and the like (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfKZclMWS1U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfKZclMWS1U). But they are still setting themselves up for English-language people pretending they can pronounce anything Latin-looking—despite English itself demanding you memorize the dictionary twice, for speaking and writing. So Kazakhstan will soon have its own great writer Karel Kaypek.
- grishka 6y agoI'm genuinely envious to people who can get by with just a single keyboard layout.