Thanks to Asmus and Kenneth for their clarifying comments. Things are
beginning to seem to make sense to me... (:-)
Especially, I'm quite relieved to see now that:
- for any one of the common printing variants of mute iota that a user might
want to see,
- there is already at least one easily available truetype font, so that
- even *without* special glyph shaping or glyph substitution mechanisms in
display,
- there will be at least one way of encoding that will be stable, in the
sense that it will guarantee the desired display and not get corrupted when
undergoing canonical composition/decmposition;
and, most importantly:
- all these encodings will be recognized as equivalent by Unicode
applications when it comes to case-insensitive matching (because all these
character sequences case-fold to the same sequence of vowel + small iota
(03B9)). That's something, isn't it?
What will *not* work, for most users, is automatic case *conversion*. This
will lead to undesired or unexpected results in most cases. But there are
other independent reasons for that anyway: For most users, correct
uppercasing also involves the stripping of accents and breathings, and the
Unicode casing rules don't provide for that either. But then again: who
wants to use automatic case conversion for polytonic Greek anyway? (I can
hardly remember having ever used it even in the Latin script in all the text
processing I've done.) People will simply be typing sequences that Unicode
will see as irregular mixed-case strings, but who cares? I guess all the
computational features that really matter to most of us common mortals (like
sorting, word searches etc.) involve the "case-folding" feature used for
case-insensitive matching, and as I said above, this seems to work out in a
fairly intuitive and sensible way.
So, after all, the UTC people do deserve a pat on the back for their good
work? (:-)
I have another ignorant layman's sort of question, but I'll put it into a
second message because it really consitutes a different topic.
Lukas
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:21:15 EDT