>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.
This has been attempted. Cf. ISO 10036, which describes how to add glyphs to an
international standard for glyphs. This registry is being maintained by the
Association for Font Information Interchange. It has been somewhat moribund for
the past few years, however, apparently due to lack of interest.
Please note that the problems a glyph standard like that of ISO 10036 are mostly
those of font developers and not at all of application developers. Just because
we agree that the glyph dotless j will have an id of x00000123 (or whatever it
actually is), that doesn't do anything for application developers or for users.
In the suggested model, the user still enters dotfull j plus whatever combining
diacritics into their document, i.e. the application is still working with
Unicode sans any dotless j. It is still up to the system or whatever rendering
engine the app is depending upon to get the dotless glyph. This can be done with
a glyph registry, but it can also be done without it. Either way, it's done
without adding the dotless j to Unicode, which is what this thread is all about.
Peter
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