On the term 'Greeking Threshold'

Anyone you want to nail on this one?

The person at Adobe was Thomas Phinney, product manager for fonts. Thomas was relieved of his post in December 2008 when Adobe announced that it would lay off 600 people.

More to the point, there is a debate at the EU level and at the member country level about how to sustain multilingual society.

When I worked for a chartered translation company in the nineteen-eighties, IBM Danmark (they do no want to called IBM Denmark) had a localisation policy.

IBM Danmark tried to introduce datamat instead of computer, fast pladelager instead of harddisk, and so on and so forth.

If the protective separation of character processing from glyph processing is to be taught in schools, as it should in my opinion, then Apple (and Adobe) will have a hard time.

Type size is specified in Anglo-American points to the inch, despite DIN and BS metric attempts in the nineteen-seventies which were overruled by the Adobe/Apple/Linotype alliance.

Type style is specified in Anglo-American traditional terminology that dates from Joseph Moxon's seventeenth century manual on type making (roman and italic, not antiqua and cursive).

Type scaling is again the same issue, 'Greek' and 'Greeking' whereas there are times when I would prefer 'American' and 'Americanising' as the more apt technical term, if only to turn the tables for this one time only.

Unicode character names are in English translation and English transliteration - only the ASCII character set is supported for the character syntax (there is a caveat in the Character Palette, but from the Unicode point of view the caveat can be considered a bug and not a benefit).

And the list goes on and on and on. There are tiny rays of light, like the NAME table in the TrueType Specification that supports localisation of smart shaping and smart scaling from within the intelligent font file itself, but these rays of light are few and far between.

/hh

For what it's worth, the term greek for unintelligible text predates predates printing

Printing was introduced at a point when a wave of universities were being founded by Papal permission. Universitatis Hafniensis (Københavns Universitet) was founded in 1479, if memory serves. Universitatis Wittenbergensis in 1522. And so forth.

Latin letters as Greek letters and Hebrew letters were composed, but of the three Latin letters were the most common. The compositors were doing piecework, paid by the measure, and the piecework was harder for the less common languages including Greek and Hebrew.

Until 1856, doctoral dissertations at Københavns Universitet had to be submitted in Latin. Aboard the Endeavour, David Solander, a student of Linnæus at Uppsala, penned the first zoological description of a kangaroo in Latin, not in Swedish, not in German, not in French, and not in English.

/hh

where this term becomes "Grænse for mumletekst".

Right, mumletekst merely means mumble text. Adobe nor Apple are advised to adopt technical terms that are non-ethnic. The argument that it is 'traditional Anglo-American typographic terminology' is irrelevant, because what Adobe and Apple are selling is not traditional Anglo-American typographic technology nor are the customers traditional Anglo-American typographers.

Compare the irrelevant change of PARAGRAPH SIGN in Unicode 1.0 (see Inside Macintosh: Text, 1993 for the original character name) to PILCROW SIGN. There are absolutely no everyday Anglo-American endusers who know that PILCROW SIGN is traditional Anglo-American typographic terminology (from *********** Latin).

/hh

it wasn't text at all but simply a fat line drawn with a chisel point lead pencil approximately the x height of the proposed text

Right, that's also how it works in some applications. Adobe, if memory serves, at the point at which the discussion arose showed a gray bar with no attempt at showing glyph shapes.

/hh