From: Mark E. Shoulson (mark@kli.org)
Date: Sun Nov 09 2003 - 14:07:58 EST
Philippe Verdy wrote:
>From: "Michael Everson" <everson@evertype.com>
>
>
>>At 17:54 +0100 2003-11-09, Philippe Verdy wrote:
>>
>>
>>>From: "Michael Everson" <everson@evertype.com>
>>>
>>>
>>>> When we encode Tifinagh we will encode Tifinagh. We will not
>>>> meta-encode it for ease of transliteration to other scripts.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>Yes that was the intent of my suggestion, I don't say that this must
>>>be done. But what would be wrong if a font was created for the
>>>Tifinagh script that would display Latin-based glyphs with
>>>diacritics rather than historic glyphs?
>>>
>>>
>>I think you should go back and learn about the characater/glyph model
>>if you think this is a good idea.
>>
>>
>
>I think we are bothering each other, simply because of mutual
>misunderstanding. There's nothing in my question above that breaks that
>model: the abstract character coded in the Tifinagh script is kept unchanged
>and separated from the actual glyph it uses when rendering.
>
>So my question is, once again: would a font that would display pointed Latin
>glyphs from Tifinagh script code points really break the Unicode model?
>
*shrug* If you want to play with weird fonts that give automatic
transliterations, go ahead. I don't think that's necessarily a bad idea
(I like doing much the same myself), and in fact can come in quite
handy, but it isn't really Unicode's business. Unicode will encode
Tifinagh as Tifinagh is (hopefully), not as Tifinagh might be or could
be or should be. A font that displays Tifinagh encoded as it is, as
Tifinagh as it "should" be, could be a very useful thing (or a useless
one, depending on who's looking), but is outside of the purview of Unicode.
> If
>not, then we have a convenient way to define Tifinagh keyboards / input
>methods based on this _apparent_ transliteration. This still requires a
>specific mapping to codepoints in the keyboard driver when set to input for
>Tifinagh, allows editing with a set of glyphs that a user can read, and then
>render it transparently with a real Tifinagh font.
>
This is one for keyboard designers. If the users of the script have a
different input style already in use, they may not feel it's necessary
to mess around with another one (which doesn't make it useless: I keep
my keyboard set to a Hebrew input method based on the Michigan-Claremont
transliteration system, and wholly unlike any normal Israeli keyboard,
because it's something I can remember and something that works.) Again,
not a Unicode problem, I would think.
~mark
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