Re: Complex Combining

From: Andrew C. West (andrewcwest@alumni.princeton.edu)
Date: Fri Nov 28 2003 - 04:57:13 EST

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    On Thu, 27 Nov 2003 08:11:55 -0800, Peter Kirk wrote:
    >
    > This is all rather interesting speculation. There are surely a lot of
    > potential cases in scripts where some kind of combining mark can be
    > considered as applying to a sequence of an arbitrary number of
    > characters. For example:
    >
    > Enclosing circles, squares and ellipses.
    > Continuous underlines and overlines.
    > Continuous tildes, slurs, contour tone marks etc which may apply to
    > several characters or whole words.
    > The cartouche in Egyptian hieroglyphs, which surrounds a group of
    > several characters.
    > A number of mathematical functions e.g. fraction dividers, extensions to
    > root signs.
    > Combining marks which are supposed to be centred over or under two or
    > more characters or even a whole word, like the Hebrew masora circle.
    >

    For music, formatting characters exist for marks that extend over multiple
    characters :
    U+1D173..1D174 MUSICAL SYMBOL BEGIN BEAM..END BEAM
    U+1D175..1D176 MUSICAL SYMBOL BEGIN TIE..END TIE
    U+1D177..1D178 MUSICAL SYMBOL BEGIN SLUR..END SLUR
    U+1D179..1D17A MUSICAL SYMBOL BEGIN PHRASE..END PHRASE

    For Egyption Hieroglyphs similar formatting characters have been proposed to
    deal with cartouches (see http://std.dkuug.dk/JTC1/SC2/WG2/docs/n1944.pdf) :

    U+x307..x308 EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPHIC BEGIN CARTOUCHE..END CARTOUCHE

    These are all specialised cases that are strictly necessary in order to
    represent the respective scripts. General text formatting such as underlining or
    arbitrary encirclement of characters (or cartouchement of ideographs which is
    common in traditional Chinese texts) is considered to be "rich text" and beyond
    the scope of Unicode. Whenever I read threads like this one (and they resurface
    with monotonous regularity) I do wonder whether the participants have ever read
    TUS Section 2.2 "Unicode Design Principles".

    Andrew



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