Re: Variation Selectors

From: Andrew West (andrewcwest@gmail.com)
Date: Thu Mar 30 2006 - 03:58:01 CST

  • Next message: Antoine Leca: "Re: How to encode abbreviations [Was: Representative glyphs for combining kannada signs]"

    On 29/03/06, Kent Karlsson <kent.karlsson14@comhem.se> wrote:
    > >
    > > The sort of case I am thinking of is that in which a letter L may have
    > > two contextual forms, L1 and L2 which are selected in different
    > > contexts (e.g. L1 before one set of vowels and L2 before another set
    > > of vowels). However, when writing a foreign word L2 is always used,
    > > regardless of context.
    >
    > You are convincing me even more that these variants should have
    > been encoded as separate characters, that should have separate
    > shaping properties.

    There are some things about the Mongolian encoding model that I really
    do not like, and which I think go against Unicode's fundamental
    encoding principles, but variation selectors are not one of them. Your
    suggestion of encoding contextual glyph variants separately goes
    against both the character-glyph model and the Mongolian's own sense
    of what letters their script is composed of.

    Just to reiterate, variation selectors for Mongolian are used sparsely
    in ordinary running text as the rendering system can select the
    correct glyph form of a letter from context in most cases, and the
    user (or IME) only needs to enter a VS when the context is ambiguous
    or needs to be overridden.

    Incidentally, there are a couple of cases for Mongolian where
    variation selectors are used to select simple glyph variants, which I
    agree should better have been encoded as separate characters:

    U+1880 MONGOLIAN LETTER ALI GALI ANUSVARA ONE
    U+1881 MONGOLIAN LETTER ALI GALI VISARGA ONE

    In fact, I think that the spurious "ONE" in the names of these
    characters must be a relic of an early draft which included MONGOLIAN
    LETTER ALI GALI ANUSVARA ONE, MONGOLIAN LETTER ALI GALI ANUSVARA TWO,
    MONGOLIAN LETTER ALI GALI VISARGA ONE and MONGOLIAN LETTER ALI GALI
    VISARGA TWO (just my hypothesis, but if Ken or anyone can confirm or
    deny it ...).

    > It's not really too late yet, I think, to deprecate
    > the FVSs...
    >

    Well, yes it is.

    Andrew



    This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Thu Mar 30 2006 - 03:58:56 CST