Re: Combining Triple Diacritics (N3915) not accepted by UTC #125

From: Khaled Hosny (khaledhosny@eglug.org)
Date: Wed Nov 10 2010 - 12:03:11 CST

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    On Wed, Nov 10, 2010 at 06:11:08PM +0100, Karl Pentzlin wrote:
    > >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).

    Advanced typesetting engines like TeX (which were invented 30 years ago,
    mind you) already support wide accents that span multiple characters:

    $\widehat{abcd}$
    $\widetilde{abcd}$
    \bye

    Even math formulas in new MS Office versions can do that (well it is
    math because, apparently, only mathematicians cared about that, but I
    don't see why it should not work for linguists too).

    Regards,
     Khaled 

    -- 
 Khaled Hosny
 Arabic localiser and member of Arabeyes.org team
 Free font developer

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