WYSIWYG and WYSIWYS : heads up warning
WYSIWYG and WYSIWYS : heads up warning
- Subject: WYSIWYG and WYSIWYS : heads up warning
- From: Henrik Holmegaard <email@hidden>
- Date: Mon, 23 Feb 2004 08:54:07 +0100
A short note on device independence. PostScript, and more recently PDF,
ensure resolution independence, but resolution independence and device
independence are not the same thing.
In the open world PostScript created in 1984, every application was
able to translate it's internal data structures into PostScript, and
every printer was able to render PostScript. This allowed end users to
self-configure the color devices of their choice.
PostScript Level 1 had no concept of a color device profile. PostScript
Level 2 and PostScript 3 have a concept of a color device profile which
is internal to its graphics model, and which function as a back-end to
ICC color profiles.
Now, it's neat to be able to preserve color appearance across devices.
But there is no search engine in the wide world that finds device color
co-ordinates or CIE co-ordinates. Search engines are like people, they
find _text_ co-ordinates.
ASCII developed out of the limitations of newspaper typesetting which
again developed out of the limitations of the Linotype composer and the
teletext machine. These are clueless about Roman typography, let alone
Arabic or Kanji typography.
MacRoman addressed this in a very limited way by introducing custom
code points for the fi and fl ligature. Other run of the mill ASCII
variants introduced other ligatures. And high-end foundries introduced
fine typography ligatures with house encodings.
Here comes a heads up for all of you with thousands of dollars worth of
fine typography fonts based on house encodings. Any PDF you create with
these fonts is _not_ searchable because there is no ToUnicode mapping
available.
Forget WYSIWYG, that was a first generation phenomenon. In the world of
real device independence, you need WYSIWYS. That is, What You See Is
What You Search. In the PDF itself and across PDF documents on the
World Wide Web.
It is now genuinely possible to do an RGB workflow with a single
InDesign document for multiple resolutions and multiple destinations.
But if you fail to address the Unicode problem, you may as well forget
the concept of an RGB workflow.
There is no font foundry with an update policy in place. Call your font
foundry and demand that it addresses the problem.
There is page design and text editing software which does not support
Unicode. Call your page design and text editing vendor and demand that
Unicode be addressed.
This ends today's awareness campaign -:).
Thanks,
Henrik
----------------------------------------------------
Henrik Holmegaard, Technical Writer
Tel +45 3880 0721 / +45 3881 0721
Tollosevej 69, DK-2700 Bronshoj
----------------------------------------------------
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