Combining diacriticals and Cyrillic

From: vladimirg@need.bg
Date: Thu Jul 10 2003 - 04:24:01 EDT

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    Dear Ladys and Gentlemen,

    Currently there is an ongoing effort in Bulgaria trying to resolve an issuie concerning the way we write in Bulgarian.

    Our problem is:

    Usually a bulgarian regular user does not need to write accented characters. There is one middle-sized exclusion of this, but generally we do fine without accented characters. The problem is that in some special cases or more serious lingustic work, one definetely needs to be able to write accented characters (accented vowels).

    One of the ideas is to invent a new ASCII-based encodings, containing the accented characters we need. This would introduce an additional disorder in the current mess of cyrillic encodings, and would introduce problems with automated spellcheck.

    Generally I beleive it would be best to invent a Unicode based solution.

    Such a solution is for example, combining diacritical signs with the cyrillic symbols.

    I composed a demo page:
    http://v.bulport.com/bugs/opera/426/balhaah_lonex_org/

    and then made 10-20 shots of the results on Opera and IE on Linux, Windows 98 and Windows XP:
    http://v.bulport.com/bugs/opera/426/balhaah_lonex_org/shots.html

    You can see that this approach yields _quite_ incosistent and useless results, depending on the font, application and operating system being used.

    Finally, I wonder if you could give us some advice:

    1.
    Is it possible somehow to improve this approach? I imagine eg., if the font can provide prepared combined symbols whenever the application asks for a combined cyrillic+diacritical, instead of leaving the application to do the combination.

    2.
    Do you see other unicode based approach to the Bulgarian problem?

    3.
    Do you beleive the approach should be looked for outside Unicode?

    Please excuse me for wasting your time,
    Vladimir,
    Bulgaria



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