From: James Kass (thunder-bird@earthlink.net)
Date: Wed Jul 11 2007 - 17:32:57 CDT
Brian Wilson wrote,
>The Lao convention goes back at least to the 1920's as one of the
>dictionaries I have is a reprint of that. The other is from the ministry of
>education. I have seen primers from various eras. So there is consensus in
>Laos for using an x to represent Lao vowels without a base consonant.
>Regarding Thai, they use a dash-like symbol. I was just suggesting that
>since a dash is needed for Thai and an x is needed for Lao, then why not
>make them both available to each other.
We have (at least) two issues going on here.
1) Should existing conventions with regard to displaying
combining marks without base characters be supported?
2) Should rendering engines and fonts be designed to
"correctly" display any combining mark on any base
character?
I answer "yes" to (1) and "no" to (2). Sorry for
being unclear.
Perhaps what is needed is a new range of characters
supporting documented existing symbols. The first
new character to be proposed should probably be a
dotted circle, as this is a common method of display.
Using U+25CC for this purpose is a "hack". It may be
a good "hack", but it's still a "hack".
The Unicode note for U+25CC says "note that the reference
glyph for this *character* is intentionally larger than
the dotted circle *glyph* used to indicate combining
characters in this standard...". (Emphasis added.)
It looks like there is currently no *character* in TUS
which has the semantics we seek.
Best regards,
James Kass
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