From: Karl Pentzlin (karl-pentzlin@acssoft.de)
Date: Wed Nov 10 2010 - 11:11:08 CST
From the Pre-Preliminary minutes of UTC #125 (L2/10-416):
> C.4 Preliminary Proposal to enable the use of Combining Triple
> Diacritics in Plain Text (WG2 N3915) [Pentzlin, L2/10-353]
- see http://std.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/n3915.pdf
> [125-A13] ... UTC does not believe that either solution A or solution B
> represents an appropriate encoding solution for the text
> representation problem shown in this document. Appropriate
> technology involving markup should be applied to the problem of
> representation of text at this level.
This will not happen.
Linguists will continue to use their PUA code points (or even their
8-bit fonts), which employ these characters perfectly (albeit using
precomposed glyphs for the used combinations).
> This is not plain text.
It *is*, at least for the applications in dialectology where groups of
three characters linked by one of the proposed triple diacritics have a
well-defined and documented meaning.
This is also proven by the fact that the existing PUA characters
fulfill perfectly the needs of the relevant academic communities,
except being interchangeable without using special fonts containing
these PUA characters (a request which could be overcome when these
characters are contained in Unicode).
> Processes such as line-breaking do not know about these, or the
> double diacritics, and this creates problems for processes.
Problems are there to be solved, and they are solvable.
E.g., simply state that no line break may occur in the realm of a
diacritic spanning over three letters.
Latin *is* a complex script, anyway.
- Karl Pentzlin
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