Re: [office] Support for Alternative Glyphs

[robert_weir@us.ibm.com]

"Charles-H. Schulz" <charles-h.schulz@arsaperta.com>
wrote on 07/04/2008 09:54:27 AM:

> Hello,
> 
> this is a very short message about the requested feature related to
 
> Alternative Glyphs: http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/office-
> comment/200610/msg00000.html
> I just wanted to let you know that I very much support this comment
 
> and would be happy to help on this issue.
> 

Is there a convention for how to encode these "alternative
glyphs"?

By sticking to Unicode we have the ability in ODF
to easily exchange text content with anyone else that understands Unicode.
 So transformation to HTML is easy, indexing by search engines is
easy, etc.  

If we layer on an additional encoding mechanism on
top of Unicode, I'd want to make sure that the things that are easy today
remain easy.

For example, most of the text in an ODF document is
content like this:

<p>hello world</p>

We could annotate a character with an alternative
glyph through some ad-hoc escape mechanism:

<p>hello w##27orld</p>

Or we could introduce a character element to provide
additional attributes at a character level:

<p>hello <c altGlyph="27">w</c>orld<p>

Either method makes it more complicated for doing
simple operations on the text.  This also seems very font-specific.
 So a document created on Windows with one font and then displayed
on Linux with a fall-back font will probably not be able to use the same
alternative glyph.  In fact, their rendering may look incorrect if
they try.

Are there any XML markups that currently support alternative
glyphs?  How do they do it?

-Rob