Re: E0000 Language Tags for Archaic Greek Alphabets

From: Doug Ewell (dewell@adelphia.net)
Date: Mon Feb 28 2005 - 10:20:33 CST

  • Next message: Peter Kirk: "Re: E0000 Language Tags for Archaic Greek Alphabets"

    Doug <UList at dfa dash mail dot com> wrote:

    > But I want to go even a little further, in order to implement *all*
    > the possible variations of archaic Greek scripts in one smart font. I
    > want to define
    >
    > OLD_CRETAN_DORIC_LTR (left to right)
    > OLD_CRETAN_DORIC_RTL (right to left)
    > OLD_CRETAN_DORIC_ALT_LTR (alternate, left to right)
    > OLD_CRETAN_DORIC_ALT_RTL (alternate, right to left)
    >
    > and this, or more, for perhaps 10 different archaic Greek scripts...
    > err, I mean dialects.

    Encoding these in the Private Use Area is more straightforward, less
    stateful, more in keeping with the Unicode way of doing things (one
    character per code point), more likely to be implemented, and less
    dependent on an advanced technology that still isn't supported on many
    platforms.

    RTL directionality can't be implemented using the code points for an LTR
    script like Greek, unless you use directional overrides, which defeats
    the whole purpose of coding them distinctly.

    > And perhaps I should actually ask Unicode for an E0000 Tag [Script]
    > and Tag [End Script] rather than continuing my fairly poor attempt to
    > masquerade as dialects. The E0000 documentation says more Tags like
    > [Language] will be added, and [Script] sounds like a good one.

    The Unicode Standard says that more Plane 14 tags *could* be added, not
    that they *will*. In the meantime, the entire Plane 14 tagging
    mechanism has fallen out of favor, and the likelihood that more Plane 14
    tags will be added in the future seems vanishingly small.

    -Doug Ewell
     Fullerton, California
     http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/



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