From: Jony Rosenne (rosennej@qsm.co.il)
Date: Fri Jun 27 2003 - 04:09:59 EDT
Whatever you do, any new characters designed for solving these problems
should not be in the Hebrew block. Add a new Biblical Hebrew block, clearly
labeled as not intended for regular Hebrew use.
And I suggest that whenever a proposal comes up to the UTC, it would be
advantageous to involve Israeli Biblical scientists in the review.
Jony
> -----Original Message-----
> From: unicode-bounce@unicode.org
> [mailto:unicode-bounce@unicode.org] On Behalf Of John Hudson
> Sent: Friday, June 27, 2003 2:29 AM
> To: Rick McGowan
> Cc: unicode@unicode.org
> Subject: SPAM: Re: Biblical Hebrew
>
>
> At 03:52 PM 6/26/2003, Rick McGowan wrote:
>
> >I'll weigh in to agree with Ken here. The solution of
> cloning a whole
> >set of these things just to fix combining behavior is, to
> understate,
> >not quite nice.
>
> No, but would be far from the not nicest thing in Unicode,
> and there's a
> really good reason for it. I was originally intrigued by
> Ken's ZWJ idea --
> or by a variant of it using some new re-ordering inhibiting
> character, to
> avoid overloading ZWJ any further --, but the more I think
> about it, the
> more not nice I think it is to force Biblical scholars to
> carry the can for
> errors in the Unicode combining classes.
>
> Control characters, usually ZWJ and ZWNJ, seem to get
> proposed as solutions
> to all sorts of text processing complexities. Some of these
> are perfectly
> legitimate and reflect the need of users to be able to to control the
> display of text in different ways, e.g. by forcing half-forms
> in Indic
> scripts. But I don't think control characters should be used
> as fixes for
> mistakes, especially not when the distinction is not between
> two different
> but equally valid ways of displaying the same text, e.g. as a
> conjunct
> ligature or with half-forms, but between displaying text correctly or
> incorrectly. How many English users would accept a text
> processing model in
> which the distinction between 'goal' and 'gaol' relied on
> insertion of a
> control character between the vowels? I believe the aim in
> fixing this
> problem in Unicode should be to provide Biblical scholars
> with a good text
> processing experience, not with awkward kludges, even if that
> means making
> the Unicode Hebrew block look weird with duplicated marks.
> The standard
> should serve the users, not the aesthetic and organisational
> sensitivities
> of the people who design the standard.
>
> John Hudson
>
> Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com
> Vancouver, BC tiro@tiro.com
>
> If you browse in the shelves that, in American bookstores,
> are labeled New Age, you can find there even Saint Augustine,
> who, as far as I know, was not a fascist. But combining Saint
> Augustine and Stonehenge -- that is a symptom of Ur-Fascism.
>
> - Umberto Eco
>
>
>
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