Re: No Invisible Character - NBSP at the start of a word

From: Peter Kirk (peterkirk@qaya.org)
Date: Tue Dec 07 2004 - 05:48:03 CST

  • Next message: Lars Kristan: "RE: Invalid UTF-8 sequences (was: Re: Nicest UTF)"

    On 07/12/2004 07:52, Jony Rosenne wrote:

    >...
    >
    >Consequently, there is and cannot be anything wrong with Unicode (at least
    >in this respect) and it does support "ANY sequence of Hebrew vowels and
    >consonants".
    >
    >I do maintain that is some cases the typographic process would require out
    >of band assistance in determining the precise presentation desired, and that
    >this falls outside the scope of plain text and Unicode.
    >
    >
    >
    Jony, I can agree with you on this, for arbitrary combinations of
    combining marks. It may not always be entirely clear how these should be
    rendered.

    But it does seem that there is a long-standing (thousand year) tradition
    on how to render certain "non-standard" situations such as an isolated
    vowel point at the start of a word (represented in Unicode by NBSP +
    vowel point) and two vowel points with a single base character. It can
    be hoped that a good typographic process would (in the absence of out of
    band assistance telling it to do something different) follow this
    long-standing tradition.

    In other words: How you choose to represent Qere/Ketiv forms etc is up
    to you. But typographic processes should render NBSP + vowel point as a
    vowel point below or above a space, and two vowel points with a single
    base character should be squeezed around that base character. This is
    normal Unicode-compliant typographical practice for combining marks. It
    also allows for one way of representing Qere/Ketiv forms, which you are
    not obliged to use but is likely (although not guaranteed) to give
    sensible results.

    Do we really need to continue this discussion?

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


    This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Tue Dec 07 2004 - 11:51:48 CST