Unicode 2C1A-Glagolitic “Pe” : Fact or Fiction?
Sebastian Kempgen · 2021
Unicode 2C1A -Glagolitic "Pe": Fact or Fiction?Sebastian Kempgen (Bamberg, Germany) 1. Introduction.In recent years, Unicode has become a buzz-word within the information technology industry.As an encoding standard for all the world's characters, it can be said to have fulfilled its promise to serve as a platformindependent open standard for assigning each and every character a unique (numerical) code, so that a file containing any given character can be exchanged between users (scholars, publishers, printers, etc.), and all characters will always be displayed correctly-assuming of course, that an adequate set of fonts is available to each user. 1 To make this possible, the OpenType TrueType and OpenType PostScript font formats have been developed.Fonts whose suffix ends in .ttfor in .otfmost likely are Unicode fonts and follow this standard.2 Today, the same .ttfand .otffiles can be used on all computing platforms, irrespective of operating system, and because the font files are the same, users can be sure that files containing characters from these fonts will be displayed correctly.31 Because this is not necessarily always the case, operating system vendors can and should implement strategies to handle situations where a character must be displayed although the original font is not available.A good choice is to have a "fall back" or "last resort" font in the operating system; under Mac OS X, for example, Lucida Grande, the system font, fulfills that role.If such a mechanism has been put into place, each character that comes from a currently installed font will be correctly displayed using that font, and characters for which the correct original font is missing will be displayed using the last resort font.An additional consideration is the question of how to interact with the user in such situations: should the last resort font be used tacitly, without notifying the user that some characters could not be displayed in their original fonts and a substitute font has been used instead?Or should the user be notified and given a chance to react to the situation?Surely the latter is better, especially because, if the last resort font and the actual font are very similar, the substitution might go unnoticed.2 In practice, this may not always be the case.When users speak of Unicode fonts, they assume them to be fonts where each character has been put into the character slot allocated to it in the Unicode standard, but nothing prevents a font designer from putting a "wrong" character into a slot, either by mistake or deliberately.Inadvertent errors in assigning characters to slots are not uncommon, and deliberately using a wrong slot is a common strategy for giving users a character they need that does not have a proper place assigned in the Unicode inventory.3 Using Unicode fonts, however, does not prevent the user from making mistakes in selecting the correct character.One example is the transliteration of the soft and the hard sign in Cyrillic; both have their own counterparts in Unicode, but out of tradition (and because these characters are seldom present in standard fonts like Times New Roman) most users will use the curly quote instead, which may look better than the actual character, but which is nonetheless incorrect from an encoding perspective.