Re: Bantu click letters

From: Asmus Freytag (asmusf@ix.netcom.com)
Date: Thu Jun 10 2004 - 14:15:33 CDT

  • Next message: Michael Everson: "RE: Bantu click letters"

    At 07:46 AM 6/10/2004, John Cowan wrote:
    >To represent the text as originally written, I need a digital representation
    >for each of the characters in it. Since all I want to do is reprint
    >the book -- I don't need to use the unusual characters in interchange --
    >the PUA and a commissioned font seem just perfect to me.

    In the modern world many forms of publication require interchange. For
    example, anything that's HTML based does poorly with non-standardized
    characters. So does storage in databases. If you can conceive of a digital
    re-edition of a prominent work (including citation from) and can assume
    that there's some realistic chance that technologies other than faximile or
    PDF would be brought to bear, then you have the interchange requirement,
    even if noone uses the notation for new text.

    Over time, I'm becoming more supportive of Michael's stance of
    inclusiveness in that direction. As a matter of basic parity, I just don't
    see why we take such great pains to standardize extremely rare forms of Han
    ideographs, but baulk at supporting our own writing system and its
    extensions equally faithfully.

    That doesn't mean that we stop asking all the hard questions, but that we
    allow a presumption of usefulness for characters that were in demonstrated
    use over some time and by several authors.

    A./



    This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Thu Jun 10 2004 - 14:18:28 CDT