Stefan Persson wrote:
> AFAIK, the criteria for adding any character to the Standard is that there
> should be a difference between the character and all the other characters
> already supported by the Standard. Here we have a such difference, doesn't
> this mean that Fraktur ought to be added to the Standard.
Asmus pretty thoroughly laid out the issues for kana and Fraktur. I won't
say anything further about that.
But stepping back a little further, I would like to point out that the
assertion that:
"the criteria for adding any character to the Standard is that there
should be a difference between the character and all the other characters
already supported by the Standard" <ital>ipsissima verba</ital> <== irony warning
begs the questions which arise about the identity of the "character" in
the first place.
Every marking on paper (or papyrus, or clay, or stone, for that matter)
is not necessarily a "character" deserving of encoding as a character
in the universal character encoding, even if I can show systematic differences
between it and existing characters in the standard.
On the one hand, one must show that the differences don't fall within the
range of acceptable variation for an already existing encoded character.
And one must show that the entity in question has some verifiable
existence as an "abstract character", or that some processing requirement
forces consideration of its encoding as a character.
Merely being a distinct glyph is not enough.
> And so what? I thought the meaning of Unicode was that all languages should
> be fully supported in plain text, using one single font to displaying all of
> the characters. With old Swedish, this isn't possible.
I think this misconstrues the mission of Unicode as an encoding. The goal
is to encode sufficient characters to enable the correct and legible
representation of *plain* text in any script (modern or historic).
The goal is not and has never been to enable the plain text representation
of *all* extant and future texts of any form. For that, markup, high-level
layout, and font selection has always been required.
> Again: one language, one font.
No. One font is sufficient for monofont display of a language, tautologously.
But there is no presumption that any and all text in a language need be
displayed in a single font, or that such a goal would even be desirable.
--Ken
>
> Stefan
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Wed Jan 30 2002 - 18:46:47 EST