RE: Questions on ZWNBS - for line initial holam plus alef

From: Kent Karlsson (kentk@cs.chalmers.se)
Date: Thu Aug 07 2003 - 16:53:04 EDT

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    > > > > Canonical reordering is scoped to stop at combining class = 0.
    > > >
    > > > (I know it is. But I confess I'm not sure why.)
    > >
    > > Because God, er...., um... Mark Davis created it that way. ;-)
    >
    > Eeh, not really the answer I expected. This particular behaviour makes
    > (marginal!) sense for *enclosing* (and that means something

    Clarification: marginal since:
     . There seems to be little point in putting
       some kind of diacritic outside of an enclosing mark.
     . Trying to put a diacritic outside of a double diacritic
       is promptly considered to be inside of the double
       diacritic (see fig. 3-2 in TUS 3.0 & 4.0). I don't think there
       would have been any loss in doing the same for
       diacritic marks with enclosing marks.

    It may also be doubtful to use combining class 0 for Indic
    vowels. E.g. is there any point in distinguishing <consonant,
    nukta, dep. vowel> and <consonant, dep. vowel, nukta>?
    Or in distinguishing <consonant, anusvara, dep. vowel> and
    <consonant, dep. vowel, anusvara>? (Recall that Indic syllables
    often go through quite a lot of shaping, including far reaching
    glyph moves, unspecified by Unicode itself.) This can be
    mitigated by defined a "syllable syntax", for the benefit of
    those of us who don't find that obvious. Ok, the position of
    nuktas is nearly given, since there are precomposed characters
    with nukta. Not obvious how it interacts with conjunct formation
    though. Maybe there is sense in distinguishing the examples
    above (if so, why?).

    As I've mentioned, assigning class 0 to invisible combining
    characters, I find to be a major mistake. Can't be changed now,
    but should be mitigated somehow.

            /kent k



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