From: John Hudson (tiro@tiro.com)
Date: Sat Apr 09 2005 - 10:17:30 CST
Philippe Verdy wrote:
> Would that still be true if there exists some legacy text in the
> transition period, where a written number sequence like "85(1/2)" that
> includes the one-half glyph ambigously means "85.5" or "850"?
> In that case, this cannot be solved at the glyph processing level,
> because this is subject to human interpretation. In that case, the
> variant explicitly says that the one-half glyph is used, and probably
> means zero, but for accuracy the original one-half glyph is kept...
So you are worrying about people using the Malayalam zero character to encode '1/2'? on
the basis that in *some fonts* the glyph for this character may look like '1/2'?
A variant selector requires documentation, and anyone who needs to use it will have to
have read the documentation. So why not just provide documentation that says 'Don't use
the Malayalam ZERO character to encode the fraction 1/2' -- just in case there really
wasn't totally obvious to anyone.
Your solution presumes a level of encoding knowledge that is at odds with the problem it
seeks to solve: the only person likely to use the ZERO character as 1/2 is someone naively
selecting a character based on its appearance, e.g. from a character map or glyph
pallette. Is such a person really likely to be familiar with something as specialised and
particular as a variant selector sequence? Is this the sort of person who is going to have
read Unicode technical notes?
John Hudson
-- Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com Vancouver, BC tiro@tiro.com Currently reading: A century of philosophy, by Hans Georg Gadamer David Jones: artist and poet, ed. Paul Hills
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