Re: Biblical Hebrew (Was: Major Defect in Combining Classes of Tibetan Vowels)

From: John Hudson (tiro@tiro.com)
Date: Wed Jun 25 2003 - 22:00:47 EDT

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    At 06:22 PM 6/25/2003, Kenneth Whistler wrote:

    >Even if the ZWJ is stripped by the application before the actual
    >low-level paint API is called, so that instead of
    >
    ><lamed, qamets, ZWJ, hiriq, final mem>
    >
    >the renderer just sees
    >
    ><lamed, qamets, hiriq, final mem>
    >
    >you still end up with the order you need to make the distinction.

    Yes. That works. My biggest worry with the ZWJ is that it may affect
    positioning lookups; this requires some experiment.

    Whatever solution is finally adopted, changing texts and fonts is
    relatively simple. Changing layout engines and applications is harder and
    takes longer. We're pretty much resigned to updating texts and fonts.

    I'll discuss the ZWJ idea with our project partners, but if it does affect
    positioning lookups it is not something that will get adopted until that is
    resolved. The potential problem is that the ZWJ is used to so many
    different things now, it is difficult to know exactly what applications
    will do with it. If the intent, as in this instance, is simply to prevent
    character re-ordering, should we really be using something so loaded.
    Perhaps we need a control character specifically as a canonical order
    override: something with cc=0 but no other behaviour associated with it.

    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



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