Re: High dot/dot above punctuation?

From: André Szabolcs Szelp (a.sz.szelp@gmail.com)
Date: Thu Jul 29 2010 - 03:10:46 CDT

  • Next message: Khaled Hosny: "Re: High dot/dot above punctuation?"

    2010/7/28 Asmus Freytag <asmusf@ix.netcom.com>

    > On 7/28/2010 9:30 AM, André Szabolcs Szelp wrote:
    >
    >> You really all say, that general property Sk (DOT ABOVE) rather than Po
    >> (FULL STOP, COMMA, MIDDLE DOT) (compared with all other decimal point
    >> characters) can not cause any problems ever in certain algorithms?
    >>
    > No, we say that this is equivalent to a decimal comma - it's the same as
    > regular comma, and well-designed algorithms can tell the difference.
    >
    > Distinguishing identically looking punctuation marks by their function in
    > text on the level of character encoding is not something that has proven
    > workable.
    >

    Well,

    I have replied Ken Whistler privately on a question of his, however, in the
    particular case I'm trying to digitalize, comma is used as
    millions-separator, period as thousands separator, and high dot as decimal
    separator.
    (formally: #,###.###˙##(###...) ) (I can post the example if necessary).

    Seeing a number encoded as 1.000 — even knowing this locale!! — you cannot
    tell whether its "thousand" or "one" with explicit post-decimal zeros, IF
    you encode both the period and the high dot as FULL STOP.
    This poses a problem for _any_ contextual alternates-based approach in
    display as well.

    So in this case, actually, I think its well arguable, that encoding the
    decimal point with FULL STOP and treating it as a glyphtic variant is not
    viable.

    /Szabolcs



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