ePub Publication to test Unicode 5.1 glyph support

[Jon]

Everyone,

I just uploaded a first draft of an ePub Publication to test glyph
support in any ePub reading system for the Unicode 5.1 character set
(with some exceptions as noted in the description below.)

You may download it here:

http://www.jonnoring.net/unicode-test-publication-v001.epub

Your suggestions for improving this draft publication are welcome.

Enjoy!

Jon Noring


**********************************************************************

Description:

The purpose of this ePub Publication is to test Unicode 5.1 glyph
support in any ePub reading system for the five CSS generic font
families (serif, sans-serif, monospace, cursive and fantasy.)

All code points assigned to characters in Unicode 5.1 are supported in
this test publication, excepting:

C0 and C1 Controls
CJK Ideograph
Hangul
Private Use
High and Low Surrogate
Code points beyond the Basic Multilingual Plane
(the BMP ranges from U+0000 to U+FFFF)

For each code point, five glyphs are presented in this order: serif,
sans-serif, monospace, cursive and fantasy. If the reading system does
not provide a glyph for the particular code point/font family, it will
represent the missing glyph in some manner (e.g., as a "?" or a
"box".)

This is a very early, rough draft. Send your ideas to improve this
test publication (e.g., fix errors, document markup, CSS, this
description) to Jon Noring, j...@noring.name.

This publication is covered under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0
license. You are free to share (copy, distribute and transmit) and to
remix (adapt) this Work so long as you attribute Jon Noring
(j...@noring.name) as this Work's original creator.

[Dave Cramer]

This is great! Thanks for putting it together.

I'm just paging through the ePub in ADE. I'm of course struck by how
many characters aren't supported.

I'd like to see the navigation subdivided a bit, to include things like

Basic Latin
Latin-1 supplement
Latin Extended-A
...
Greek
Cyrillic

etc.

This might make it easier for people to find the character sets
they're interested in...

Thanks!

Dave Cramer
TexTech, Inc.

[Jon]

Dave Cramer wrote:

> This is great! Thanks for putting it together.

Thanks for the thanks!

> I'm just paging through the ePub in ADE. I'm of course struck by how
> many characters aren't supported.

A lot fewer characters are "natively" supported in ADE than in web
browsers, that's for sure. So I'd expect browser-based ePub reading
systems to provide much wider glyph support.

Of course, one may include the needed glyphs within embedded fonts.
Nevertheless, I hope ADE will expand its "generic" glyph support for
ePub.

> I'd like to see the navigation subdivided a bit, to include things
> like
>
> Basic Latin
> Latin-1 supplement
> Latin Extended-A
> ...
> Greek
> Cyrillic
>
> etc.
>
> This might make it easier for people to find the character sets
> they're interested in...

Hmmm, yes, good point. I may change this test publication to a script-
based organization rather than the current arbitrary codepoint ranges.
The Unicode "Roadmap" (see the link provided in my original message)
shows how the codepoints are allocated to various scripts/alphabets.
And I just might provide full Unicode support for all scripts and all
planes (I believe Unicode 5.2 is close to being released so I'd defer
such a major reorganization until 5.2.)

I would like feedback on improving both the underlying document
markup (e.g., should I use <table>?) and associated CSS styling.

And of course I'd like to improve the reliability of handling RTL
characters (e.g Hebrew and Arabic) -- hopefully a bidi expert here
can look over my markup and CSS and suggest improvements if the
markup/CSS is not already optimal.

Thanks again!

Jon Noring

[Robin Whitman]

Yes, this is great! ... Thank you, Jon.

And I had no idea that so many interesting characters were available.
Chess pieces! Exotic icons! Images of small Pointing fingers -- useful
for writing about politics -- all could be added to ePub publications.

I'm looking at this on Stanza desktop, for Mac -- which of course is
in a beta version.

My feature request -- which I might do -- is to create, in addition to
all the single html files, one file (either html or pdf) with all the
characters. Then I could search for specific ones, and test the
characters I use most frequently. Stanza desktop has a BOF (Bug Or
Feature) when searching: it highlights all the search results, but
does not then leap to the first instance.

Thanks again, Jon

[Ori Avtalion]

Hi,

On 02/17/2009 09:11 PM, Jon wrote:

> Dave Cramer wrote:
>> I'm just paging through the ePub in ADE. I'm of course struck by how
>> many characters aren't supported.
>
> A lot fewer characters are "natively" supported in ADE than in web
> browsers, that's for sure. So I'd expect browser-based ePub reading
> systems to provide much wider glyph support.
>
> Of course, one may include the needed glyphs within embedded fonts.
> Nevertheless, I hope ADE will expand its "generic" glyph support for
> ePub.
>

Web browsers support for displaying glyph, like ADE, is tied to font
availability. The difference is the browser accesses the system's fonts
while ADE doesn't :)

> And of course I'd like to improve the reliability of handling RTL
> characters (e.g Hebrew and Arabic) -- hopefully a bidi expert here
> can look over my markup and CSS and suggest improvements if the
> markup/CSS is not already optimal.
>

Bidi algorithms don't come into effect when dealing with single
characters. I can confirm the tables with the Hebrew and Arabic
characters look fine in Firefox.

If you want to test some Bidi features, you can use some of the tests here:
http://www.w3.org/International/tests/

Specifically:
http://www.w3.org/International/tests/sec-dir-0.html
http://www.w3.org/International/tests/sec-inline-bidi-0

-Ori

[Keith Fahlgren]

On Tue, Feb 17, 2009 at 12:00 PM, Ori Avtalion <o...@avtalion.name> wrote:
> Web browsers support for displaying glyph, like ADE, is tied to font
> availability. The difference is the browser accesses the system's fonts
> while ADE doesn't :)

I think ADE should get the System fonts or ship with a few that have a
lot of glyphs.

Keith