From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Fri Nov 26 2004 - 16:12:24 CST
From: "Doug Ewell" <dewell@adelphia.net>
> Philippe Verdy <verdy underscore p at wanadoo dot fr> wrote:
>
>> If I want to encode explicit ligatures for the "ffi" cluster, if it is
>> not hyphenated, I need to add ZWJ:
>> "ef"+ZWJ+SHY+"f"+ZWJ+"i"+SHY+"ca"+SHY+"ce" (1)
>
> Great Scott! You can use ZWJ to suggest a ligation opportunity, and SHY
> to suggest a hyphenation opportunity, but if you need to suggest both
> within the same word, let alone *between the same pair of letters*, you
> have probably stepped over the plain-text line.
If encoding ligation oportunity is not plain-text, why then have it in
Unicode?
If hyphenation opportunity is not plain-text, why then have it in Unicode?
Both exist in Unicode, and I don't think that they are considered not
plain-text. So why would you want to restrict their usage so that they will
be used only separately?
The ZWJ and SHY format controls for these two targets are added on purpose
when preparing documents for later rendering. They shouldn't affect the
collation of text and will not change their semantic, and this
transformation of text cannot be fully automated without using complex
lexical and linguistic knowledge. That's why they should be allowed in texts
kept for archiving.
If you want to use later those prepared texts on more simpler renderers and
parsers, you can still ignore and filter out the ZWJ and SHY very easily, so
this preparation work, performed most often by typists, is normally
reversible.
Nobody is required to use them, but if one wants to do it for better
rendering of prepared documents, why would Unicode forbid it? Was my
question really so stupid?
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