Re: Is it true that Unicode is insufficient for Oriental languages?

From: John Hudson (tiro@tiro.com)
Date: Thu May 22 2003 - 16:29:28 EDT

  • Next message: Asmus Freytag: "Re: Is it true that Unicode is insufficient for Oriental languages?"

    At 10:29 AM 5/22/2003, Theodore H. Smith wrote:

    >But seriously, what is so special about the Gothic style that it needs its
    >own block? That hampers text searching and complexifies things in other ways.

    Gothic is not a *style* it is a language and a script. Yes, some of the
    Gothic letters resemble Latin letters and some resemble Greek letters, but
    the same is true of the Cyrillic script. The Gothic block is not intended
    for encoding anything except text in the Gothic language.

    You may also notice, in Plane 1, a whole set of stylistic variants of the
    Latin alphabet, including italic, script and fraktur (blackletter, also
    sometimes mistakenly called 'Gothic lettering'). These are also not
    intended for encoding text in English or any other Latin script language,
    but only for use in mathematics.

    John Hudson

    Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com
    Vancouver, BC tiro@tiro.com

    If you browse in the shelves that, in American bookstores,
    are labeled New Age, you can find there even Saint Augustine,
    who, as far as I know, was not a fascist. But combining Saint
    Augustine and Stonehenge -- that is a symptom of Ur-Fascism.
                                                                 - Umberto Eco



    This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Thu May 22 2003 - 17:34:19 EDT