Re: Hawaiian language site goes Unicode

From: Peter_Constable@sil.org
Date: Wed Jun 03 1998 - 18:21:39 EDT


Keola:

You said:

> I think that was my error. In my earlier message exchanges with Ken
he
> suggested using U+2018 (single left quotation mark) instead of
U+02BB,
> and I got them mixed up. I'll fix that and use U+2018 instead.
Mahalo.

John Cowan began this discussion by asking how U+02BB was chosen, but
I don't know that he intended to convey that U+2018 would have been
better (though I don't really know for sure). Ken Whistler responded:

> I pointed out the two possible encodings they could use:

> U+2018 LEFT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK
> U+02BB MODIFIER LETTER TURNED COMMA

> and noted that U+2018 is intended for punctuation, whereas U+02BB
> is intended for letters of alphabets, as for Hawaiian.

> At the same time, I pointed out that U+2018 is more widely
> implemented in Unicode fonts than U+02BB, so that it might be
> a better choice for easiest display of Hawaiian data, despite
> the fact that it is intended for punctuation.

Please note that, as Ken pointed out, U+2018 is intended as
punctuation. If you use that as a word-forming character, a browser or
other app might give you undesireble behaviour (for, say, word/line
breaks, hyphenation) becuase it is making assumptions about the
character semantics. Since U+02BB is intended for "letters of
alphabets", it is probably a better choice in the long term, even if
there is narrower implementation for it in fonts at the present time.
You may want to reconsider this issue before you change all your
files.



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