Re: etc/HELLO markup etc.

[Werner LEMBERG <wl@gnu.org>]

>> > Finally, regarding the special handling of italics in Serbian: is
>> > there _any_ application out there that solves this problem
>> > satisfactorily in multilingual environment?  I'm not sure how you
>> > could go about that, since fonts generally cover scripts, and
>> > there's no special Serbian Cyrillic script, there's just Cyrl to
>> > cover them all.
>> 
>> OpenType fonts provide a language tag (in addition to a script tag)
>> to handle this.
> 
> Yes, but aren't these tags used only to select fonts that have
> features required by the language's shaping requirements?  That's
> what Emacs does with those.

Well, I could imagine the following use case: Within Emacs, you
activate a Serbian language environment.  This passes the script tag
`Cyrl' and the language tag `SRB' to the current font (which must be
reloaded).

Within a document, the language tag must be explicitly passed to the
text snippet in question (using some sort of markup or text
properties); while it might be possible to algorithmically deduce a
language tag for longer texts, this certainly doesn't work for just a
few characters.


    Werner