Re: A basic question on encoding Latin characters

From: Rick McGowan (rmcgowan@apple.com)
Date: Thu Sep 23 1999 - 14:03:43 EDT


Marion --

The framing of your question seems rather indirect, and lost in a series of
numbered questions. I'm almost not sure what on earth you're actually trying
to find out.

Do you mean to ask:

Is it really not necessary to have all that precomposed stuff?
And if it's not in the codeset, can end-users still print their letters?
And is there any URL that explains this, or any person who can write a paper on it?

Anyway...

1. True
2. True
3. True
4. Hm... I never heard anything about what MES has or hasn't got.
5. False. On the Unicode list, there are plenty of people who,
        if they had the free time and inclination to do so,
        could write such a paper. It may be that Mark Davis or
        another knowledgeable person is already working on
        something like what you're looking for.

Industrial implementation. Well, jeez, I get tired of saying that NeXT
shipped an industrial implementation of really nice Latin on-the-fly
composition of arbitrary combining marks. Now Apple owns this product line,
and continues to ship it and upgrade it and make it even cooler. You, or
anyone else, could buy one if you wish. The system is based on Unix (which
is buried pretty deep), and I'll grant that in general it's more suitable for
developers or big "turn-key" applications... but it does exist, and can be
used for quite fancy Latin typographical applications.

It is one industrial implementation that would be perfectly happy to have
not a single precomposed Latin accented combination encoded at all.

        Rick



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