RE: Why people still want to encode precomposed letters

From: Don Osborn (dzo@bisharat.net)
Date: Sun Nov 23 2008 - 07:01:18 CST

  • Next message: Michael Everson: "Re: Why people still want to encode precomposed letters"

    A couple of quick questions. First, about how long would the list of
    combinations be?

    Second, if the number is significant, might it make sense to approach this
    as a "Web 2.0" task, using perhaps a wiki? Under such an approach, very
    short articles could be designed to give minimal documentation and
    references, as well as relevant technical information. There would of course
    be some details to resolve about who can contribute, how contributions are
    vetted, etc., but the biggest issue would probably be the resources to
    set-up and maintain such a resource.

    The bottom line is that (a) there appears to be a need for some such
    resource and (b) no individual or expert group could be expected to come up
    with all combinations that need support. The question is whether we're only
    talking about a relative handful of cases, or whether the number of
    combinations is significant enough to require a new resource to present
    them. (I assume that there will always be the potential for new combinations
    to arise, which would be another reason to have a resource that users could
    contribute to directly.)

    Don

    --------------------------
    Peter Consable wrote on Saturday, November 22, 2008 10:30 PM:

    How would you suggest anybody do the homework needed to discover that
    arbitrary & not-well-documented language X uses combining character sequence
    <Y, Z>? Can you predict who might take an interest in a particular combining
    mark sequence two years from now?

    ...

    --------------------------
    philip chastney wrote on Sunday, November 23, 2008 6:37 AM:

    ... if the spec were restricted to known combinations found in natural
    languages with alphabetic orthographies, the list needn't be that long
     
    this list could encompass ligatures as well as characters with diacritical
    markings, and include ligatures with diacritical markings -- maybe not
    three tied characters, though, unless it was clear that they were few in
    number -- and probably not vowel shaping
     
    such a list would be an asset to font designers
     
    and it would help re-assure users of minority languages that their needs are
    known, and will (eventually) be met
     
    Unicode.org's website would be suitable repository

    ...



    This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sun Nov 23 2008 - 07:03:51 CST