G. Adam Stanislav scripsit:
> If we really want to convince all programmers to use Unicode, we can hardly
> insist that they add low level code to every single program they write to
> remove the dot from the j by directly manipulating the fonts.
Nobody is arguing for that: "dotlessj" is a perfectly legitimate
*glyph* that should be present in Latin fonts. But that is not
the same as making it a *character*. Unicode has "promoted" too
many glyphs to characters already (the Arabic presentation forms,
the ligatures, etc.) and doesn't need to make matters worse.
> Wouldn't it be considerably simpler to just add a dotless j to the Unicode
> standard so that font designers become motivated to include it in the
> fonts?
No. That would make things worse, not better, for every kind of
processing software except rendering software. There would be two
ways of representing the semantic "j" (as there are five ways of
representing the semantic "arabic jim"), one used with combining
characters and one without.
If rendering were the only purpose for text, we could skip Unicode
altogether and just use a rendering format like Postscript or
even GIF.
--
John Cowan cowan@ccil.org
I am a member of a civilization. --David Brin
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:20:48 EDT