From: Andrew Cunningham (lang.support@gmail.com)
Date: Tue Nov 18 2008 - 17:41:21 CST
Actually, insisting on precomposed characters may not make things ea sier
for some languages. Just thinking of the practicalities involved. Take
Vietnamese as an example, each combination of vowel and tone mark exists as
a single precomposed character in Unicode.
Then look at Microsoft's keyboard layout for Vietnamese. Due to the design
parameters of keyboard layouts on Windows, Microsoft used combining
diacritics for tone marks.
Currently Yoruba doesn't have all its letters available as precomposed
characters. But if it did, and you created a keyboard layout for it using
MSKLC on Windows, you would end up using some combining diacritics for tone
marking as well.
The need for combining diacritics will not go away, and for some langauges,
the existence of precomposed characters (if accepted into Unicode) will not
make an practical difference in soem environments. It will amke a difference
for some, but for diacritic heavy languages that can use more than one
diacritic on a base character at a time, there are other issues that may
make use of precomposed forms unlikely in all instances.
-- Andrew Cunningham Vicnet Research and Development Coordinator State Library of Victoria Australia andrewc@vicnet.net.au lang.support@gmail.com
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