From: Asmus Freytag (asmusf@ix.netcom.com)
Date: Fri Oct 21 2005 - 21:17:51 CST
On 10/19/2005 2:07 PM, Philippe Verdy wrote:
> I see only one way to solve the problem, if the normative name can't
> be changed: adding a usage notice in the standard (in the names list
> file), revealing their effective semantic, so that no font will be
> made erroneously, and texts or keyboards later encoded with the wrong
> codepoint.
>
You will find a number of such notices in the nameslist already.
> Without such notice published with the standard itself, this standard
> remains confusive (and given that the representative glyph is not
> completely normative and can be changed at any time for another or
> less confusive representation of some encoded character, users may
> favor the interpretation given by the normative character name, hence
> generating encoding errors...).
Glyphs are indeed not normative, because no single glyph ever captures
the entire range of visual appearance for the character. Nevertheless
there are limits on what changes can be made to a glyph, the most
important of them being that the change in glyph must respect the
underlying character identity.
> Note that the encoding order is just a possible hint of the effective
> letter, but it is not normative regarding collation in Lao, where a
> tailored collation and some preprocessing is still needed to manage
> the effective Lao sort algorithm...
>
> A good option would then be to provide the effective Lao letter names
> using Lao orthography and spelling (something that is missing anyway
> in the standard, that just published english names that are often
> unrelated to their actual usage; the English character names are only
> good in the standard itself for languages sharing the same Latin
> script, otherwise it should have adopted as much as possible the
> strictected rules for the roman transliteration from the most common
> language using that script, and for the case of Han, Unicode and
> ISO/IEC 10646 did not even chose to give any Roman names for the
> characters, not even any form of Pinyin or simple transliteration from
> Kana).
The rules of the game are: anyone can translate the character names.
They can even be translated into English. In other words, the immutable
names are formal identifiers, but they do not necessarily match with the
most common (or 'best') name in any given language, not even English.
Once you understand that, you can focus on what the standard provides,
and if you need something more (like a better name for a user interface)
you know that it's outside the scope.
A./
>
>
>
>
>
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Oct 21 2005 - 21:19:33 CST