RE: To submit or not to submit

From: Marco Cimarosti (marco.cimarosti@essetre.it)
Date: Mon May 13 2002 - 07:03:01 EDT


John Hudson [mailto:tiro@tiro.com]
> Amir, you are misunderstanding the nature of Unicode. Unicode is a
> *character* encoding standard, and the glyphs in the charts
> are intended only as a visual guide suggesting normative shapes
> for those characters.

On the other hand, we know that this sound principle has often been
"violated" for a variety of historical reasons.

Talking about kaf's, you must convene that U+0643 (ARABIC LETTER KAF ?),
U+06A9 (ARABIC LETTER KEHEH ?), and U+06AA (ARABIC LETTER SWASH KAF ?) are
just glyphic variations of the same letter.

These variations could as well have been unified, and handled via smart
fonts, but Unicode decided for disunification.

On the basis of this precedent, and on the basis of the fact that sample
glyphs on old copies Unicode book's will have a strong influence on font
designers for years, it may be wise in this case to leave the old
U+0643-like character alone and add a new U+06A9-like characters.

I would say that this would be a prudent choice in the case of an
international script like Arabic: who can make an oath that no language's
orthography ever used a letter like U+0643 with a dot above?

_ Marco



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