From: Ernest Cline (ernestcline@mindspring.com)
Date: Tue Feb 24 2004 - 19:56:26 EST
I came across this standard at
http://www.copticchurch.net/coptic_fonts/alphabet.html
It appears to be standard that aims to make it possible
to represent Coptic with a standard 101 key keyboard
without having to do anything other than specify the font.
The standard is being promoted by the Coptic Church,
but in a way that might have escaped notice, since it
seems to be going totally outside the usual standard
making mechanism.
There is nothing here that contradicts the Coptic characters
already in the pipeline, but it has a number of very poorly
documented characters in the range x81-xF8, that are
consistent among the sample fonts that are provided.
Besides providing some symbols that were displaced
by putting the Coptic letters in the low eight rows, there
are five ligated symbols similar to khi ro, and a sequence
of 29 characters that I am guessing are supposed to be
Demotic are encoded, but none of the characters above
x7E are documented by anything other than a sample glyph.
Assuming my interpretation is correct, there is no need
to delay adding the proposed Coptic block, as the
non-Demotic characters in that standard would fit into
the Coptic block quite comfortably. However, the sooner
that the other symbols can be added to Unicode, the
sooner this quasi-standard can be forgotten. (Except
for having to deal with legacy data, of course.)
I have no expertise in this area, and came across this
by accident, so I cannot do anything further with this
than what I have done, which is bring it to the attention
of this list.
Ernest Cline
ernestcline@mindspring.com
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