Re: Tildes on vowels

From: Peter_Constable@sil.org
Date: Sat Aug 10 2002 - 21:51:04 EDT


On 08/10/2002 05:42:04 PM Tex Texin wrote:

>2) Superscript, subscript, combining above, and other forms of
>identifying placement of characters, are better left to markup or other
>rendering systems and file formats (and not for a vehicle intended for
>plain text.)

I will partially disagree with Tex. It's true as a general rule that such
things should be handled by markup or rich text, for general documents, but
I think there are special application areas in which I think it is correct
to encode superscripted, subscripted or combining letters. One example is
phonetic transcription, in which phonetic symbols can be superscripted with
particular semantics. Digitising of manuscripts for paleographic research
can be another appropriate application for this.

But, I completely agree with his comments about the PUA. If there is a need
for

>a facility to
>document transcribers all around the world

then PUA makes sense if those transcribers spread around the world involve
a handful of people working with some experimental encoding because it has
not yet been worked out how all the details of the documents should be
encoded, hence it's too early for a proposal, or the documents in question
are not currently real candidates for incorporation into the standard (e.g.
Phaistos), or they are insisting on encoding in some way that is counter to
what experts has already agreed should be the preferred encoding for the
characters in question.

In general, interchange between document transcribers all around the world
should be done the same way that interchange of digital texts should always
be done: using an international character set encoding standard, preferably
Unicode. If it's really worth interchanging, it's worth adding to Unicode.
The Unicode coded character set continues to be an open set precisely
because there are still characters worthy of interchange that are not yet
part of the standard.

- Peter

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Peter Constable

Non-Roman Script Initiative, SIL International
7500 W. Camp Wisdom Rd., Dallas, TX 75236, USA
Tel: +1 972 708 7485
E-mail: <peter_constable@sil.org>



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