Re: A basic question on encoding Latin characters

From: John Hudson (tiro@tiro.com)
Date: Fri Sep 24 1999 - 17:36:47 EDT


At 01:09 PM 24-09-99 -0700, peter_constable@sil.org wrote:

> Marco:

> >1) Greater relaxation in adding new pre-composed glyphs: if
> font designers ask for them, they must have their good reasons.

> However much font designers might ask, strictly speaking they
> don't actually need them in a character encoding. That may make
> things easier for end users in the short term, but as Ken
> Whistler suggested, everything will eventually work without
> them, it's just a matter of time. Furthermore, adding new
> pre-composed glyphs just creates a lot of additional work in
> the area of normalisation and canonical equivalency, and will
> only lead to grief.

As far as I know, font designers are _not_ asking for new precomposed
glyphs to be encoded as characters, although they may occasionally enquire
why a particular glyph is not encoded, or why it has been unified with some
codepoint in a completely different range (e.g. Cyrillic letter for Kurdish
unified with codepoints in the Latin range).

Who might be expected to ask for new precomposed glyphs to be encoded?
National and linguistic user communities who look at Unicode and see that
everyone else seems to have their orthographies encoded. For example, the
new Latin orthography for Chechen adopted by the seperatist government in
the early '90s includes a number of diacritic and diphthong letters which
are unique to this orthography. While I'm sympathetic to the desire to
enforce the abstract character philosophy in Unicode, I don't want to be
the person who has to explain to the Chechens why the Germans, French,
Dutch, Italians, etc., can have all their diacritic letters encoded but the
Chechens cannot.

John Hudson

Tiro Typeworks
Vancouver, BC
www.tiro.com
tiro@tiro.com



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