Re: Etruscan

From: Martin J. Dürst (mduerst@ifi.unizh.ch)
Date: Mon Nov 03 1997 - 15:00:02 EST


On Mon, 3 Nov 1997, John H. Jenkins wrote:

> On 11/3/97 1:04 AM, Martin J. Dürst (mduerst@ifi.unizh.ch) wrote:

> >I think you don't want to use overriding to reverse things. What you
> >want is a mechanism at a higher level (e.g. styles). Setting a text
> >in left-to-right direction that runs over several lines with overrides
> >is not absolutely impossible, but extremely tedious; every character
> >has to be enclosed in an LRO-PDF pair.
>
> Huh? You lost me here.

Sorry, my fault, I was wrong.

> >- The fact that BIDI implementations will have difficulties to be
> > updated with new character properties when new characters
> > are added (this would in essence be a strong suggestion that
> > everything except U+0580-U+7FF is LTR) would get consideration
> >
>
> Er, I don't think we can do that. I don't think implementers should count on all RTL scripts being encoded in that one range. Certainly we anticipate various dead RTL scripts being put on Plane 1 (Meroitic, South Arabian).
>
> People should be getting the directionality properties from the properties file, nowhere else.

I see people wanting to use Unicode in an Internet protocol or a W3C
document format all the time. Things like these are always a problem.
Properties are compiled into applications or operating systems, or
reside in configuration files if one is lucky. Updating one of these
because some new characters are defined is not going to happen easily,
but that's what everybody would want. People are even discussing doing
syntax checks by downloading the unicode character/properties file.

Has anybody at Unicode thought about the strain and the accessibility
requirements this would have on the Unicode web site? About splitting
the properties file into smaller junks, for examlpe blocks of 1024,
with an index of changes, or diff files in a suitable format, so that
downloads of new properties can be faster? About mirror sites,...?

Regards, Martin.



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:20:37 EDT