From: Peter Kirk (peterkirk@qaya.org)
Date: Mon Dec 15 2003 - 13:55:29 EST
On 15/12/2003 08:03, Arcane Jill wrote:
>
> I sometimes wonder whether or not it was a wise choice to regard
> "LATIN SMALL LETTER I" and "LATIN SMALL LETTER DOTLESS I" as distinct.
> Too late to change it now, of course, but (with the benefit of
> hindsight) it occurs to me that if U+0069 had been regarded as
> dotless, all these problems would never have arisen. Western fonts
> could still have rendered it with a dot, Turkish fonts could have
> rendered it without a dot, and everyone would have been happy.
Not Turks and Azerbaijanis. They would face the prospect that their
languages would be unrepresentable with standard fonts. Don't forget
that these languages also have a dotted small i which is a distinct letter.
It would actually make more sense to specify U+0049 as dotted and that
multi-purpose fonts should render it with a dot, with the dotless
version as a glyph variant for localised use only. After all, a dot on I
is acceptable in English etc, used in a few fonts, and leads to no
ambiguity (except when one of these fonts is used to write Turkish or
Azerbaijani!). Your suggestion would create far more confusion.
But let's stick to what we have got rather than try to change anything now.
-- Peter Kirk peter@qaya.org (personal) peterkirk@qaya.org (work) http://www.qaya.org/
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