Re: missing characters: combining marks above runs of more than 2 base letters

Ken, you mention "defined markup constructions", but nothing would prevent
specialized rendering software from, for example, connecting a left half
mark with the corresponding right half mark via titlo, even though the text
is still only plain text with no markup, right? The titlo would simply not
display as such in the absence of the right software.

On Fri, Nov 18, 2011 at 8:03 PM, Ken Whistler <kenw_at_sybase.com> wrote:

> On 11/17/2011 11:28 PM, Philippe Verdy wrote:
>
>> Could the Unicode text specify that a left half mark, when it is
>> followed by a right half-mark on the same line, has to be joined ? And
>> which character can we select in a font to mark the intermediate
>> characters between them ?
>>
>
> No.
>
> This kind of stuff is not plain text. Mathematicians and musical scorere
> long ago got over
> the notion that marking of scoped constructs (with beams and ties in music,
> and similar kinds of scoping for expressions in math) could be plain text.
>
> People who "score" text, whether metricians, prosodic analysts, or
> phoneticians, need to learn the same lesson. Unicode is not a repository
> for text scoring hacks, with the expectation that all of the rendering
> implementations
> will quietly incorporate this kind of complexity into their already complex
> requirements for plain text rendering of writing systems.
>
> People who need to score text will have to make use of specialized
> rendering software and defined markup constructions, just like the
> mathematicians and musicians do.
>
> --Ken
>
>
>
Received on Fri Nov 18 2011 - 13:25:05 CST