From: Doug Ewell (dewell@roadrunner.com)
Date: Sun Jan 06 2008 - 19:30:11 CST
Kent Karlsson <kent dot karlsson14 at comhem dot se> wrote:
> The document you refered to there in turn refers to
> http://www.mufi.info/specs/MUFI-Alphabetic-2-0.pdf.
> That document unfortunately does not seem up to speed with Unicode,
> even though it (inaccurately) states "Compliant with the Unicode
> Standard version 5.0".
>
> For instance, it allocates to the PUA characters that are already
> encoded in non-PUA, albeit as combining sequences rather than single
> characters.
MUFI has a known preference for precomposed characters. See section 2
of the Introduction, where they acknowledge that "Unicode is very
unwilling to add more precomposed characters" and concede that all of
their precomposed letters can be represented by sequences, but then
continue:
"Smart Font technology is needed in order to display and print
decomposed characters properly. At the time of writing, this technology
is not yet fully mature, and there are also several competing
technologies, such as OpenType (Microsoft), Apple Advanced Typography
(Apple) and Graphite (Summer Institute of Linguistics). For this
reason, we believe that precomposed characters will be needed for some
time."
Note that Uniscribe 1.042 and Doulos SIL under XP -- not necessarily the
epitome of "smart font technology" -- will render MUFI's example <006F,
0328, 0301> perfectly.
The front matter of the MUFI document says, "Many aspects of this
recommendation may be controversial, and more than one of the
contributors and advisors listed above may disagree with the solutions."
It's not clear whether providing PUA code points for precomposed letters
is one of those aspects.
I don't mean to be a MUFI detractor in general; they have worked hard to
provide a solution for representing many as-yet unencoded letters. I'm
only addressing the issue with precomposed letters.
-- Doug Ewell * Fullerton, California, USA * RFC 4645 * UTN #14 http://www.ewellic.org http://www1.ietf.org/html.charters/ltru-charter.html http://www.alvestrand.no/mailman/listinfo/ietf-languages ˆ
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