RE: Conflicting principles

From: Kent Karlsson (kentk@cs.chalmers.se)
Date: Thu Aug 07 2003 - 16:52:20 EDT

  • Next message: Kent Karlsson: "RE: Questions on ZWNBS - for line initial holam plus alef"

    > > And it would starkly illustrate
    > > the fact that an appropriate character encoding does not
    > > necessarily directly reflect the phonological structure of
    > > a language as represented by that script.
    >
    > "Not necessarily" is the operative word. The question is whether that
    > failure to reflect is tolerable. At present, three possibilities have
    > been kicked about:
    >
    > 1) Encode the vowel signs as combining characters, and therefore after
    > the base characters over/under which they appear, logical order be
    > damned.
    >
    > 2) Encode the vowel signs as base characters explicitly ligatured with
    > ZWJ to the characters over/under which they appear, in
    > logical order.
    >
    > 3) Encode the vowel signs as base characters implicitly ligatured by
    > the font ligaturing table to the base characters
    > over/under which they
    > appear, in logical order. This alternative requires the use of
    > distinct ligaturing tables (perhaps distinct fonts) for different
    > modes of use.

    How about:

    4) Encode the vowel signs as combining characters, after
        the base characters they logical follow. Consider them as
        "double" [width] combining characters, that happen to
        have no "ink" above/below the character they apply to,
        but (like double width combining characters) have ink
        over/under the glyph for the base character that follows.

    (I know Ken wouldn't like it.)

    If these vowels may occur on word initial bases, there may
    be a problem (esp. at the beginning of lines/paragraphs)...

            /kent k



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