From: Peter Kirk (peterkirk@qaya.org)
Date: Mon Apr 19 2004 - 17:45:43 EDT
On 19/04/2004 13:03, Kenneth Whistler wrote:
>... Those other middle dots give
>people textual representation alternatives now, if they need to make
>distinctions, and textual rendering alternatives, if they need to make
>middle dots which display with slightly different heights, sizes, or
>spacings, depending on the rendering requirements.
>
>
Ken, does Unicode specify height, size and spacing distinctions between
the various middle dots which you listed? If I understand correctly, it
certainly doesn't do so exhaustively. So in effect what you are
suggesting here is that people make and use their own private
distinctions between characters which are not defined by Unicode. This
sounds very like advising people to ignore Unicode character identiies
and properties and do their own thing. Rather strange advice from
someone in your position, surely?
Surely, in the current situation and if further proliferation of middle
dots is considered undesirable, users should be advised to presume that
distinctions between middle dots are not a plain text matter and so
should be handled by markup, including language selection.
And if (as I just suggested on the Hebrew list might be true of some
variant Hebrew pointing systems) someone finds a well documented script
in which a true middle dot and an x-height dot are used contrastively,
the correct approach would be either to accept, reluctantly, that at
least one new dot needs to be encoded; or else for Unicode to define
clearly which existing character should be used for which dot in this
script. The worst thing that could happen would be for different text
providers to make different and incompatible selections among the
existing characters, leading to total confusion. But that seems to be
the approach which you, Ken, are advocating.
-- Peter Kirk peter@qaya.org (personal) peterkirk@qaya.org (work) http://www.qaya.org/
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