My, my. The assumptions of 1-1 character-glyph mapping run deep! :-)
Nobody has shown evidence of the independent, isolated character dotless j.
If there is evidence of the character, then there is justification for
encoding.
When a rendering engine sees j followed by a a combining mark, it either
finds a precomposed glyph for that combination, or it takes the j-base glyph
(aka dotless j) and adds the combining mark. A font could even have no glyph
at all for dotted-j, and always create it by composition (same for i). There
is no necessity for the rendering process to remove parts of a glyph. There
is no necessity for Unicode to provide codepoints for glyph fragments that
otherwise have no independent existence.
A similar process must be applied to render other scripts correctly: a given
combining mark changes the shape of the base character (adding or removing
parts, changing it's height, or whatever). J is not unique in this regard,
and deserves no more special treatment than characters in any other script.
--- Paul
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:20:48 EDT