chiark / gitweb /
Add character variant for curly apostrophe (SAA5051/2)
Unicode takes the position that U+0027 APOSTROPHE is always a straight
apostrophe and is you want a curly one you should use U+2019 RIGHT
SINGLE QUOTATION MARK (or U+02BC MODIFIER LETTER APOSTROPHE but let's
not get into that here). Bedstead generally follows that, putting the
SAA5050 straight apostrophe at U+0027 and the SAA5055 curly one at
U+2019.
Older character standards, though, conflated those two and treated the
difference between them as one of font design. In particular, ETS 300
706: May 1997, "Enhanced Teletext specification" treats position 2/7 as
being the same character in all national sub-sets of the Latin G0
primary set. When coverting Teletext data to Unicode, ZVBI maps 2/7 to
U+0027 whichever national sub-set is in use.
This means that to faithfully display Teletext data in the way that an
SAA5051/2 would, Bedstead needs to interpret U+0027 as a curly
apostrophe. I have accomplished this by adding a new "apostrophe.curly"
alias and including that in the 'ss01' and 'ss02' Stylistic Sets. It
also, of course, gains a new Character Variant feature, 'cv07', so that
you can turn the curly apostrophe on and off independently.
This does cause me to wonder whether there should be a stylistic set to
map U+0020..U+007E onto the SAA5055 glyphs.