From: John Hudson (tiro@tiro.com)
Date: Tue Jul 22 2003 - 23:49:09 EDT
Thinking about this whole Hebrew encoding/normalisation problem from the
rendering side -- i.e. in terms of smart font glyph substitution and mark
positioning -- it seems me that *if* a character is to be inserted between
two vowels that visually follow a single consonant, it would be preferable
if this were not a control character. If the character is something that is
actually painted as a glyph, it is incredibly easy to resolve the rendering
problems in the font's composition/decomposition <ccmp> feature by, for
example, ignoring marks while 'ligating' the consonant + extra character to
the consonant glyph alone. This would happen before the mark positioning
takes place, so would ensure that the presence of the extra character does
not break mark positioning in the way that actual control characters seem
to (and which cannot be be included in <ccmp> lookups because they are not
painted).
Of course, if this problem is thought about from the text search, sort,
etc. perspective, the presence of a non-control character -- even an
invisible one -- introduces problems, since it changes the encoding of the
word. As noted previously, users are unlikely to know that they must insert
an invisible character into search strings. My question is whether this is
something that can be addressed in search engines and other places
affected, so that this character could be filtered out during operations?
Or, failing that, if we might here have a use for a new zero-width
character that will be ignored during search and sort operations --- as
control characters like ZWNJ and CGJ are -- but which will be painted -- as
control characters typically are not?
John Hudson
Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com
Vancouver, BC tiro@tiro.com
The sight of James Cox from the BBC's World at One,
interviewing Robin Oakley, CNN's man in Europe,
surrounded by a scrum of furiously scribbling print
journalists will stand for some time as the apogee of
media cannibalism.
- Emma Brockes, at the EU summit
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