Re: New contribution

From: Peter Kirk (peterkirk@qaya.org)
Date: Sat May 01 2004 - 09:58:56 CST


On 29/04/2004 17:36, Michael Everson wrote:

> At 10:34 -0700 2004-04-29, Peter Kirk wrote:
>
>> But what answer do you have to my point, made in more detail
>> elsewhere, that it will cause total confusion, and defeat the
>> purposes of Unicode, if some people use the new characters and others
>> don't?
>
>
> Frankly I'd say it's an unreasonable suggestion on your part. NO ONE
> is forced to use Sinhala, Brahmi, Myanmar, or Devanagari script to
> represent Buddhist texts in Pali. Scholars, and the Pali Text Society,
> happily ignore these scripts and use Latin. Similarly, NO ONE will be
> forced to use Phoenician script to represent early Phoenician language
> if they find it hard to read and prefer to represent it in Hebrew
> script, or in Latin.

But do scholars and the Pali Text Society encode the texts in Latin and
then use masquerading fonts or whatever to render the texts in whichever
script they prefer to? Very likely they do at the moment. Is that what
Unicode wishes to encourage? I doubt it. Of course no one is forced to
conform to Unicode - except perhaps by their software - but these are
things on which the Unicode standard at least implicitly rules.

-- 
Peter Kirk
peter@qaya.org (personal)
peterkirk@qaya.org (work)
http://www.qaya.org/


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