Michael Everson wrote (in separate messages):
>Gods forfend that we provide convenience and compatibility to the end-user,
right, John? ;-)
>I don't suppose one character would be so dreadful.
>I think that complex Arabic and Indic shaping behaviour is a fine thing.
Requiring it for Latin to remove a _dot_ seems a bit much to me.
>It isn't funny. Linguists have a real need to combine diacritics. Bounding-box
specifications in Unicode stack glyphs really nicely, and the user or process
can choose dotless i (which is present in the UCS) but can't choose dotless j
unless some phonetically-minded font guy had the foresight to put it in the
font.
As you're currently working on a proposal for Finno-Ugaric phonetics and have
some awareness of what linguists need, I'm rather surprised at your comments.
You are clearly aware that handling phonetic text, with all of the possible
diacritics combinations, requires either that you have rendering technology that
can select glyphs as needed according to context and position them as needed, or
that you allocate a myriad of presentation forms. This is not just a matter of
removing one dot in the case of Latin; there is a lot more involved: each
diacritic needs to be provided in several overstrike widths and at various
heights (to allow for multiple combining marks). If you're asking for the
dotless j as a character, then why aren't you asking for all of these?
It simply won't stop at just one character; whether a dotless j is allocated or
no, there will be lots of requests for presentation forms for years to come, and
as Ken W has been wont to point out lately, it can't go on without limit. A
dotless j may be convenient for you and some others today, but it has potential
to cause inconvenience to others for years. Yes, it's just one character you're
asking about, but where do we draw the line?
Peter
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:20:48 EDT