From: Michael Everson (everson@evertype.com)
Date: Mon Jul 07 2008 - 14:43:45 CDT
At 12:20 -0700 2008-07-07, John Hudson wrote:
>John H. Jenkins wrote:
>
>>Nothing, really, since U+2135 ALEF SYMBOL is formally a
>>compatibility variant of U+05D0 HEBREW LETTER ALEF and thus will go
>>bye-bye if you normalize using NFKC or NFKD. In practice, the most
>>important thing distinguishing the two is directionality. U+2135
>>ALEF SYMBOL has directionality L and U+05D0 HEBREW LETTER ALEF has
>>directionality R.
>
>Allowing normalisation to resolve to a character with different
>directionality seems to me risky. Isn't there a danger of the strong
>RTL directionality of U+05D0 messing up layout if substituted for
>U+2135 in some circumstances?
I agree. We have a generic LTR symbol SAMARITAN SHIN, and now are
encoding RTL Samaritan script.
>From a glyph perspective, the design of these two characters
>legitimately differs, since the symbol characters are often
>harmonised to Latin cap-height, while the traditional height of
>Hebrew text is between Latin cap- and x-height.
>
>This seems to me a very unwelcome decomposition, but I suppose it is
>frozen thus for all time by stability agreements.
I agree. Alas.
-- Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com
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