Re: U+0140

From: Asmus Freytag (asmusf@ix.netcom.com)
Date: Tue Apr 20 2004 - 02:27:19 EDT

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    At 03:49 PM 4/19/2004, Kenneth Whistler wrote:
    >The Unicode Standard is not prescriptive about rendering, beyond the
    >basics required to simply ensure correct mapping of textual content
    >into streams of characters. If one font vendor wants to have a raised
    >glyph for the MIDDLE DOT and another wants to have a lowered glyph for
    >the same character, it is not the Unicode Standard's business to put
    >the two vendors in a room until one gives up and admits the other one
    >is correct.

    I'm sorry but that part of your answer is a bit disingenous in the context
    of the issue most recently discussed on this thread. That involved the case
    of two characters 00B7 and 0387, which have been post-hoc unified via
    canonical equivalence. We are discovering that the vast majority of
    *multi-script* fonts makes a distinction in glyph based on the character
    code (ignoring the canonical equivalence). This therefore is not the simple
    case of a Greek font using a higher dot for 00B7 as an ano teleia and a
    Latin font using a lower one for the mid dot.

    We clearly *do* see a variation of treatments of 00B7 across fonts, but in
    all cases that I've seen, these are intended as variations of the middle
    dot, not variations to accommodate the use of this character as ano teleia.

    In other words, we have an issue that the equivalence of identity of these
    two characters asserted by Unicode is fundamentally not respected by the
    implementers. And apparently it's not the case of a small minority. I think
    that kind of situation *is* a problem for the standard.

    A./



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