Re: Conflicting principles

From: John Jenkins (jenkins@apple.com)
Date: Wed Aug 06 2003 - 19:12:39 EDT

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    On Wednesday, August 6, 2003, at 3:53 PM, Peter Kirk wrote:
    > This answer presupposes that there is a well-defined concept of which
    > base character a combining mark belongs to. That is not always true.
    > The particukar combining mark which precipitated the debate may be
    > situated above the gap between the (logically and phonetically)
    > preceding and following characters, or may move on to the preceding or
    > the following characters depending on the precise context and on the
    > typographer's preference.
    >

    If its behavior is substantially different from that of existing
    combining marks, then there's no reason not to suggest it be added with
    its own properties. Just don't add it as a combining mark. (This is
    basically what happened, e.g., with the ideographic description
    characters.)

    > Anyway, John J, what code are we talking about that has to work from
    > the positions of the combining marks back to the underlying
    > representation? Are you talking about OCR?
    >

    No, the issue is more how to start from a base form and work forward to
    encompass the whole series of characters which need to be treated "as
    one" in certain processes, which can include cursor movement, hit
    testing, display, line breaking, collation, normalization.

    ========
    John H. Jenkins
    jenkins@apple.com
    jhjenkins@mac.com
    http://homepage..mac.com/jhjenkins/



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