From: Peter Kirk (peter.r.kirk@ntlworld.com)
Date: Thu Jul 10 2003 - 06:08:09 EDT
On 1st July Philippe Verdy wrote:
> If fonts still want to display dots on these characters, that's a
> rendering problem: there already exists a lot of fonts used for
> languages other than Turkish and Azeri, which do not display any
> dot on a lowercase ASCII i or j (dotted), and display a dot on their
> uppercase ASCII versions (normally not dotted with classic fonts)...
>
> The absence or presence of these dots is then seen as "decorative"
> even if these fonts are not suitable for Turkish and Azeri, but this is
> clearly not an encoding problem in the Unicode encoded text,
> and not a problem either for case conversions.
>
Turkish and Azeri do not use the ij ligature. The sequences i - j and
dotless i - j do occur (rarely, as j is a rare letter in both languages)
but are treated as separate letters.
In Turkish and Azeri the sequences f - i and f - dotless i both occur,
and are fairly frequent. So it is inappropriate in these languages to
use fi ligatures in which the dot on the i is lost or invisible, at
least where the second character is a dotted i. Has any thought been
given to this issue? Is it possible to block such ligation on a
language-dependent basis?
Also it is certainly possible that in dictionaries etc in these
languages stress might be marked by an accent on the vowel - as
certainly in the older Cyrillic Azeri just as in Bulgarian as just
posted. In this case the dot should not be removed from the dotted i
when the stress mark is added, so that the distinction from dotless i is
not lost. Has that issue been addressed? (In my Latin script Azeri
dictionary stress is marked by a spacing grave accent before the vowel,
but this may have been done precisely to work around this problem.)
-- Peter Kirk peter.r.kirk@ntlworld.com http://web.onetel.net.uk/~peterkirk/
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