From: Alexej Kryukov (akrioukov@newmail.ru)
Date: Mon Aug 22 2005 - 16:46:48 CDT
On Monday 22 August 2005 23:00, John Hudson wrote:
>
> This sort of thing (see also Japanese Ruby notation and Ethiopic
> liturgical/chant notation) is normally considered a layout issue,
> i.e. a glyph processing and positioning issue rather than a character
> encoding issue.
Well, in case of Ruby notation or any other superscript notation
the superscript text belongs to a separate text flow. This is something
quite different than letter-titlos, which represent an integral
part of any Church Slavonic text and behave exactly like combining
diacritical marks (in fact, they *are* combining marks).
> So the first thing to do would be to confirm whether
> the letter-titlos are simply glyph variants of the regular letters,
> as superscript Latin letters are,
The main reason to consider letter-titlos separate characters is that
using them is required according to the rules of Church Slavonic
orthography. These rules are quite complex and cannot be described
by a simple algorithm, so that replacing regular letters with
letter-titlos can't be entrusted to a rendering engine.
If this is not a sufficient reason for encoding characters and
Unicode prefers to consider them glyph variants, then well, it's still
Unicode's task to propose a consistent method of encoding Church
Slavonic. In this case we need at least a standard way to tell rendering
engine that a specific character should be rendered as a combining mark.
It would be nice to have in Unicode something like "ZERO WIDTH
COMBINING MARK MARKER", but, until there is no such character,
I would insist on encoding letter-titlos.
> and whether the special form of the
> titlo used with these letters is a glyph variant of the combining
> titlo mark.
Well, this is a purely technical (and so less important) question.
Particularly I would be quite happy with the existing combining titlo,
but some people will argue, I know...
-- Regards, Alexej Kryukov <akrioukov at newmail dot ru> Moscow State University Historical Faculty
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Mon Aug 22 2005 - 16:47:32 CDT