Position Paper for Internationalization Workshop in Paris

Steve Zilles
Manager of Standards
Adobe Systems Incorporated
Mountain View, CA, USA
szilles@adobe.com

Adobe Systems Incorporated is a developer of software for creating, displaying and printing documents, electronically. Adobe is the originator of the PostScript Language and the Portable Document Format, both of which work on an international basis. Adobe also has document creation products, such as Adobe Pagemaker and Adobe Framemaker that are distributed internationally and Adobe PageMill and Adobe SiteMill which are used for creating and maintaining collections of HTML documents.

I personal am interested in the problems of providing font support for internationalized HTML documents. Although Unicode/ISO 10646 goes a long way to satisfying much of the coding requirements, there are special glyphs and/or characters that have no standard meaning in Unicode/ISO 10646. One example of these are the "gaiji" (foriegn) characters used in the spelling of company or personal names in Japan. Another example is being able to access display variants of standard characters (often called swash glyphs); for example, the Adobe Poetica font has 57 different variants of the ampersand "&" character, multiple instances of which might be used in the design of particularly flowery document.

I look forward to discussing this and the other issues raised with respect to internationalization.