Re: PUA (BMP) planned characters HTML tables

On 2019-08-15 12:25 AM, Asmus Freytag via Unicode wrote:

Empirically, it has been observed that some distinctions that are claimed by
users, standards developers or implementers were de-facto not honored by type
developers (and users selecting fonts) as long as the native text doesn't
contain minimal pairs.

Quickly checked a couple of older on-line PDFs and both used the comma below unabashedly.

Quoting from this page (which appears to be more modern than the PDFs),
http://www.trussel2.com/MOD/peloktxt.htm

"Ij keememej ḷọk wōt ke ikar uwe ippān Jema kab ruo ṃōṃaan ilo juon booj jidikdik eo roñoul ruo ne aitokan im jiljino ne depakpakin. Ilo iien in eor jiljilimjuon ak rualitōk aō iiō—Ij jab kanooj ememej. Wa in ṃōṃkaj kar ..."

It seems that users are happy to employ a dot below in lieu of either a comma or cedilla.  This newer web page is from a book published in 1978.  There's a scan of the original book cover. Although the book title is all caps hand printing it appears that commas were used.  The Marshallese orthography which uses commas/cedillas is fairly recent, replacing an older scheme devised by missionaries.  Perhaps the actual users have already resolved this dilemma by simply using dots below.

That may be the case for Marshallese. But wouldn't surprise me.

My comments were based on a different case of the same kinds of diacritics below (other languages) and at the time we consulted typographic samples including newsprint that were using pre-Unicode technologies. In that sense a cleaner case, because there was no influence by what Unicode did or didn't do.

Now, having said that, I do get it that some materials, like text books, online class materials etc. need to be prepared / printed using the normative style for the given orthography.

But it's a far cry from claiming that all text in a given language is invariably done only one way.

A./