Re: Accessing alternate glyphs from plain text

From: Doug Ewell (doug@ewellic.org)
Date: Tue Aug 10 2010 - 11:15:16 CDT

  • Next message: Jukka K. Korpela: "Re: Apostrophe in transliteration"

    Jukka K. Korpela <jkorpela at cs dot tut dot fi> wrote:

    > Human writing did not originate as plain text, and at the surface
    > level, it is never "plain text": it always has some specific physical
    > appearance, and abstract "plain text" can only be found below the
    > surface, as the underlying data format where only character identities
    > (character numbers in a specific code) are encoded, with no reference
    > to a particular rendering.

    I have the same trouble with this argument that I had last time it was
    made. Your handwritten A and mine may look different, and both may
    differ from a typewritten A, but they have something in common that
    allows us to identify them with each other. The whole premise of
    reading and writing is that we look below the surface to the identity of
    the letters and the meaning of the words.

    Saying that rendering text always has an appearance is not the same as
    saying that all text is rich text. The latter viewpoint is what leads
    some people to propose nonce variations in penmanship as Unicode
    characters.

    --
    Doug Ewell | Thornton, Colorado, USA | http://www.ewellic.org
    RFC 5645, 4645, UTN #14 | ietf-languages @ is dot gd slash 2kf0s ­
    


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