Re: etc/HELLO markup etc.

[Yuri Khan]

On Sat, Dec 22, 2018 at 3:13 PM Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> wrote:

> I'm not yet sure this is only about Han unification.  Using charsets
> for specifying fonts is a general feature in Emacs, which can be used
> to control which fonts are selected independently of what the OS
> facilities such as fontconfig do.

There is at least one more situation where different glyphs
could/should be selected for the same Unicode code points, which
charset markup does not solve.

I’m talking about italic shapes of Cyrillic letters. For some of them,
Russian and Bulgarian use one shape but Serbian and Macedonian use
another shape[1]. There are no examples of Bulgarian, Serbian, or
Macedonian in HELLO, but Russian, Ukrainian and Mongolian examples are
all marked up as “cyrillic-iso8859-5”, which is an encoding that does
not carry language information.

So: charset markup is not the right solution to the problem of
rendering the same Unicode code point with different glyphs.

[1]: 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrillic_script#/media/File:Cyrillic_cursive.svg