RE: Why Fraktur is irrelevant (was RE: Fraktur Legibility (was Re: Response to Everson Phoenician)

From: Peter Constable (petercon@microsoft.com)
Date: Wed May 26 2004 - 15:37:10 CDT

  • Next message: Dean Snyder: "Re: PH: the core issues (was RE: Palaeo-Hebrew, Phoenician, and Unicode (Phoenician Unicode proposal)"

    > From: Peter Kirk [mailto:peterkirk@qaya.org]
    > Sent: Wednesday, May 26, 2004 1:08 PM

    > >Legibility is *one* consideration. Certainly we must use it
    consistently
    > >wrt PH as for other cases. But now that we have established what that
    > >means (some people find PH used for Hebrew text to be illegible, so
    > >distinct encoding *may* be warranted), we don't need to refer to
    Fraktur
    > >any further to apply it to PH.

    > If we can all agree that legibility is not a sufficient criterion on
    its
    > own for encoding Phoenician and Palaeo-Hebrew separately, then let's
    > indeed move on and see if there are any other technical arguments for
    > separate encoding. I don't remember seeing any.

    Saying that legibility is not a sufficient criterion does not imply that
    it is irrelevant or non technical. The *only* conclusion we can make
    from the preceding is that there is no reason whatsoever to continue
    discussing Fraktur when what we are really trying to make decisions on
    is PH. And, since legibility is a technical criterion (non-sufficient,
    but still a necessary consideration), even if there are no *other*
    reasons, your conclusion

    > This seems to suggest to
    > me that there is no technical justification for the proposal.

    is invalid. For that reason, and because I believe others have provided
    additional technical reasons, my own response to the question

    > Can we agree on that?

    is "no".

    > If so, we need to ask a more general question: should the UTC encode
    > scripts for which there is a (small, in this case) demand but no
    > technical justification?

    We can ask that question, but I don't think it can be fairly applied to
    this situation. You say there is no technical justification, but there
    are technical issues that the pro-unification camp has not yet, that
    I've noticed, responded to after repeated requests. You continue to
    insist that the demand is small based on the premise that only a few
    individuals on this list have said they have a need -- but there are
    often no more than a small number of members of a user community for a
    given script or characters subscribed to this list, and the number of
    pro-unification and anti-unification opinions that have been voiced here
    by people claiming to be part of the user community(ies) is not
    significantly different.

    Peter
     
    Peter Constable
    Globalization Infrastructure and Font Technologies
    Microsoft Windows Division



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