From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Thu Jul 10 2003 - 11:21:36 EDT
On Thursday, July 10, 2003 12:08 PM, Peter Kirk <peter.r.kirk@ntlworld.com> wrote:
> On 1st July Philippe Verdy wrote:
>
> > If fonts still want to display dots on these characters, that's a
> > rendering problem: there already exists a lot of fonts used for
> > languages other than Turkish and Azeri, which do not display any
> > dot on a lowercase ASCII i or j (dotted), and display a dot on their
> > uppercase ASCII versions (normally not dotted with classic fonts)...
> >
> > The absence or presence of these dots is then seen as "decorative"
> > even if these fonts are not suitable for Turkish and Azeri, but
> > this is clearly not an encoding problem in the Unicode encoded text,
> > and not a problem either for case conversions.
> >
>
> Turkish and Azeri do not use the ij ligature. The sequences i - j and
> dotless i - j do occur (rarely, as j is a rare letter in both
> languages) but are treated as separate letters.
I know, and the quoted paragraph did not speak about the ij ligature
but effectively about the separate dotted/dotless i/I letters, for which
"decorated" fonts where the lowercase ASCII (dotted) i codepoint
uses a dotless glyph, or the uppercase ASCII (dotless) I codepoint
uses a dotted glyph (some fonts are ligating the dot with decorative
curves). These fonts are effectively not suitable for Turkish and
Azeri.
> In Turkish and Azeri the sequences f - i and f - dotless i both occur,
> and are fairly frequent. So it is inappropriate in these languages to
> use fi ligatures in which the dot on the i is lost or invisible, at
> least where the second character is a dotted i. Has any thought been
> given to this issue? Is it possible to block such ligation on a
> language-dependent basis?
Isn't there a "Grapheme Disjoiner" format control character to force the
absence of a ligature like <fi>, i.e. <f, GDJ, i>?
> Also it is certainly possible that in dictionaries etc in these
> languages stress might be marked by an accent on the vowel - as
> certainly in the older Cyrillic Azeri just as in Bulgarian as just
> posted. In this case the dot should not be removed from the dotted i
> when the stress mark is added, so that the distinction from dotless i
> is not lost. Has that issue been addressed? (In my Latin script Azeri
> dictionary stress is marked by a spacing grave accent before the
> vowel, but this may have been done precisely to work around this
> problem.)
This is part of the proposal for review: an explicit combining dot-above
diacritic can be inserted between the normal (soft-dotted) base letter
and the above diacritic (with class 230):
<latin-small-i, dot-above, accute-accent>
<cyrillic-small-je, dot-above, grave-accent>
-- Philippe.
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