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

From: Kenneth Whistler (kenw@sybase.com)
Date: Thu May 22 2003 - 19:07:26 EDT

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

    Philippe Verdy wondered:

    > Additionally, mathematics has a heay use of diacritics above,
    > below, around or over letter symbols. I just wonder if standard
    > combining characters (starting at 0x300), can be used with them
    > in addition to supplementary mathematical diacritics like arrows,
    > prime symbols, etc...

    Yes.

    Notable examples: U+0304 COMBINING MACRON and U+0307 COMBINING DOT
    ABOVE.

    > Given that it's difficult to represent all mathematics notation
    > in pure textual (i.e. Unicode)

    you mean: in plain text
     
    > representations, I wonder if all
    > those characters are really useful, even for maths,

    Yes. Recent additions of large numbers of mathematical
    symbols were done at the request of and with the expert
    participation of the STIX Consortium of mathematical and
    technical publishers, nomenclatural and font experts of
    the American Mathematical Society, participants in MathML
    development, and developers of commercial mathematical
    formulae handling software.

    > as complex notations cannot be encoded only with Unicode, but
    > require a much more complex layout engine than traditional text
    > layout (even more complex than the Tibetan subjoined letters, or
    > Korean clusters), which can't fit with maths needs which requires
    > contextual interpretation and embeddable sub-encoding blocks with
    > special markup (unless we use many pairs of parenthesis and
    > simplified functional symbols).

    See the Draft UTF on Unicode Support for Mathematics:

    http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr25/

    which addresses these issues.

    --Ken



    This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Thu May 22 2003 - 19:58:36 EDT