On Mon, Jul 05, 1999 at 02:14:20PM +0100, Christopher J. Fynn wrote:
> However if you know of specific j+diacritic combinations which are widely used
> in writing some language but are not found encoded as characters in the Unicode
> Standard, then perhaps you should demonstrate this and try to make the case
> that these combinations should be individually encoded as separate characters
> on the basis of prior usage or compatibility.
The problem is that they are NOT widely used. The language I was having in mind
is mathematics (and related languages, such as physics). In mathematic notation
it is possible to use any Latin and Greek (and other) character with just
about any diacritic.
And it is not a matter of prior use in this case either. Who are we to tell
mathematicians and physicists that they may only use characters that are
naturally dotless in their notation?
Clearly, I am not the only one here who thinks a dotless j would be useful
(for what it's worth, I did not start this discussion, someone else did).
Here is a question about dotless i, by the way: It has been stated that it
is a true character because it is used in Turkish. I would like to know if
*that* was the reason Adobe has been including it in every font. I have
my suspicion that Adobe included it in their original PS fonts precisely
because they felt the need to be able to create the letter i with any
diacritic possible, not because it also happened to be a Turkish
character. (And please do not interpret this as being negative about
Adobe, I happen to think very highly about Adobe.)
Again, I repeat my suggestion that no one has replied to yet: Why not have
two standards? One for glyphs, one for characters and only characters?
After all, we are dealing with computer communications, and just about
all other computer communications is done in layers. It seems to make
a lot of sense to have a different standard for application software,
and a different one for system (or presentation) software.
Adam
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