From: Peter Constable (petercon@microsoft.com)
Date: Wed May 26 2004 - 17:41:37 CDT
> From: Peter Kirk [mailto:peterkirk@qaya.org]
> Sent: Wednesday, May 26, 2004 2:44 PM
> Well, what are these technical issues? The only technical issue
> concerning which there have been "repeated requests", at least since
the
> early stages of this thread which I may have forgotten, has been the
> issue of legibility.
Legibility has been one technical issue: for (at least some) non-Semitic
paleographers, text that displayed as square Hebrew characters would
fail to convey the intended semantics.
Text-corpus queries are another concern for the same users: they do
*not* want PH characters folded with Hebrew characters. I realize that
the Semiticists would like the two folded, but it is not difficult to
neutralize a distinction in data, whereas it is *very* difficult to
infer distinctions that do not exist in the data.
These are at least two technical issues for non-Semiticist paleographers
that are a significant problem with a unified encoding. In contrast, any
problems faced by Semiticist paleographers can be handled without
difficulty if two distinct scripts are encoded.
I have asked more than once for the pro-unification camp to acknowledge
and respond to these concerns, and am still waiting to hear even an
acknowledgement.
A further consideration is how the needs of users other than
paleographers can best be served.
Peter
Peter Constable
Globalization Infrastructure and Font Technologies
Microsoft Windows Division
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