Re: dotless j

From: Michael Everson (everson@indigo.ie)
Date: Mon Jul 05 1999 - 12:38:36 EDT


Ar 09:59 -0400 1999-07-05, scríobh LaBontÈ, Alain:

>[Alain] What troubles me is that, in a way similar to what Michael says,
>some will be tempted (because of bad rendering systems) to use DOTLESS I in
>order to compose an I CIRCUMFLEX or an I DIAERESIS, while canonically these
>are not equivalent to Îî or Ïï...

Tempted? I do this now with Quark XPress when I need to write Lithuanian
I-OGONEK or older Greenlandic I-TILDE without stopping and making a font
for them. And as you know, I'm good at making fonts.

Most users are not.

>Problem is that ISO/IEC 10646 does not preculde to use any letter with any
>combianing character... Unicode is more prescriptive, although I guess it
>is not forbidden either to do like in the ISO standard (it is just that
>canonical equivalence is not guaranteed then, which puts the problem back
>to square one).

Unicode cannot prevent a user from using any letter with any combining
character either.

>The same problem could occur if we were to encode a DOTLESS J. I hear what
>Michael says though, and it makes sense to me. Solving it will also create
>a problem that exists with DOTLESS I used outside of Turkish.

How big of a problem? There are only 2 precomposed small-j characters in
the UCS.

--
Michael Everson * Everson Gunn Teoranta * http://www.indigo.ie/egt
15 Port Chaeimhghein Íochtarach; Baile Átha Cliath 2; Éire/Ireland
Guthán: +353 1 478 2597 ** Facsa: +353 1 478 2597 (by arrangement)
27 Páirc an Fhéithlinn;  Baile an Bhóthair;  Co. Átha Cliath; Éire



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