From: Peter Kirk (peter.r.kirk@ntlworld.com)
Date: Tue Jul 29 2003 - 18:33:33 EDT
On 29/07/2003 12:23, John Hudson wrote:
> In this case, there are two encoding preferences with related display
> preferences. One preference preserves and displays a distinction, and
> one preference removes and hides a distinction. I prefer the former,
> and various contributors have explained why it is a good idea to
> preserve the distinction. Jony doesn't seem to be interested in the
> distinction. Fonts can cater to both, so it seems to me that the main
> impact is in comparing texts that preserve the distinction with those
> that don't.
OK, so we could have it that for the vowel sound the sequence holam-vav
is the preferred encoding, but vav-holam is a less preferred
alternative. That would be analogous to preferring ß in German or
accented upper case in French, but accepting ss or unaccented capitals
as a less preferred alternative which may be encountered in some texts.
But would that meet SII's criteria? If not, it would be like a refusal
to allow ß or accented upper case in Unicode because users had got used
to not having them available on older computers.
>
>
>> An even more clever font would then have the option of detecting
>> which vav-holam sequences are actually the vowel and displaying
>> accordingly, thus meeting the objection that the visual display
>> should depend on the font etc rather than on the choice of otherwise
>> equivalent encodings.
>
>
> Fonts don't get that clever.
Probably not. Do they have any option to set a flag like "the last
character was a vowel" which can then be tested when the next character
is painted? If so there is a chance of detecting this efficiently
without having to be too clever.
-- Peter Kirk peter.r.kirk@ntlworld.com http://web.onetel.net.uk/~peterkirk/
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