On Wed, 22 Nov 2000, John Hudson wrote:
> At 08:05 AM 11/22/2000 -0800, Lukas Pietsch wrote:
>
> >By the way, I wouldn't agree with Kenneth that it wasn't a good idea to have
> >the precomposed characters in Unicode in the first place. I'm very glad they
> >are there, since, as we see, the beautiful smart rendering features we are
> >talking about are simply not yet available in mainstream text processing
> >software.
>
> The counter argument could be made: that if Unicode had not accepted so
> many precomposed diacritic characters, especially in the Latin blocks,
> smart rendering software would have become mainstream much sooner. It is
> unfortunately true that, if smart rendering were necessary to process
> German and French, it would have been a priority many years ago.
I agree with you on this point. I guess this is kind of 'kitchen
and egg' issue. Let me draw another example from Korean Hangul. If
Unicode/ISO-10646 had just a subset of precomposed syllables (perhaps
2350 of them from KS X 1001) and left out the rest (some 8000 of them
for modern Korean) to be composed out of Jamos(alphabets) in U1100
block, we would be more(though not very much more) likely to have
rendering infrastructure on major platforms that can offer 'beautiful
rendering features' for Hangul (which is essential for the full support
of modern, let alone medivial, Korean). (I'm well aware that Korean
delegation adamantly insisted that all 11,172 of them be included, but
in retrospect.......) And, the same might be true of Greek and other
scripts for which both precomposed characters and 'component' characters
(decomposed) are available.
Jungshik Shin
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