From: Peter Kirk (peterkirk@qaya.org)
Date: Mon Mar 29 2004 - 13:13:32 EST
On 29/03/2004 08:42, Peter Constable wrote:
>>You can't get away with it that easily. If the standard specifies that
>><space, combining mark> should be displayed as an isolated combining
>>mark, then it would be conformant for a partial implementation to
>>display this sequence as nothing or as an illegal sequence. But if the
>>system attempts to display the sequence in a meaningful manner, it
>>
>>
>must
>
>
>>do so according to the standard, i.e. not as dotted circle plus
>>combining mark.
>>
>>
>
>Are you saying that you'd like to see apps display text according to the
>correct behaviour for a given script, or not at all?
>
>
I would prefer to see the text displayed according to the standard. In
this particular case, I would prefer to see the standard fixed rather
than the rendering system. But it is a source of great confusion to
everyone when a widely used application does something clearly different
from what the standard intends, and yet claims "conformance" even if
technically this is correct.
There is clearly a widespread need to display a variety of combining
marks in isolation, and with no dotted circle. Unicode defines an
encoding for this. Uniscribe apparently does not support this encoding.
There is something wrong here.
It seems, from what Srivas (Avarangal) wrote, to be part of the
requirement for correct display of Tamil, and perhaps other Indic
languages, to be able to display isolated forms of such characters as
U+0BC6. If Uniscribe does not support this, even if it is technically
Unicode conformant, Microsoft cannot claim to support Tamil and other
languages.
>I don't think that would be particularly helpful. And I think it's a
>good thing the conformance requirements don't attempt to define what
>"not supporting such-and-such characters" means at this level of detail.
>
>
>
I agree, I think. But a claim to support particular scripts or languages
surely implies that all characters in that script (or at least in its
modern form) are supported. That is not perhaps a Unicode requirement,
but at least in the UK a failure here might be a breach of laws on
truthful advertising and description of products.
-- Peter Kirk peter@qaya.org (personal) peterkirk@qaya.org (work) http://www.qaya.org/
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