From: Peter Kirk (peterkirk@qaya.org)
Date: Mon Jul 11 2005 - 17:26:06 CDT
On 11/07/2005 18:57, Asmus Freytag wrote:
> ...
>
>> Not the most pressing issue in the world, I admit, and maybe not such
>> a problem for latinate scripts. This came up in the context of
>> proofreading an encoding of the Quran. Seems like it might be an
>> issue for any script with complex rendering logic.
>
>
> I've been waiting for you to come up with a hard case. Here's one: if
> there are two spellings that produce the same visual appearance, and
> one is right sometimes and the other is right some other times, and
> only a human reader can define what the correct one is by
> understanding the context.
>
I'm not sure about an Arabic script case, but here is one in Latin
script and English language, where the visual appearance in many fonts
is only very subtly different, a subtlety which may be entirely lost on
a computer screen with limited resolution:
The Scottish name "Iain", a fairly common variant of "Ian", spelled with
a capital I at the start;
and the English word "lain", past participle of "lay", spelled with a
small L at the start.
And then of course there is always the case of paypal.com and paypaI.com
(the latter with a capital I), which people may want to get right even
when not being used on the Internet. But I suppose a spelling check
could deal with that one.
In fact I think Gregg started this thread with a bad example. The two
encodings for a with circumflex are canonically equivalent and so
different encodings of the same data. The cases Gregg really needs to
deal with are when the alternatives are not canonically equivalent but
semantically distinct.
-- Peter Kirk peter@qaya.org (personal) peterkirk@qaya.org (work) http://www.qaya.org/ -- No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Anti-Virus. Version: 7.0.323 / Virus Database: 267.8.11/45 - Release Date: 09/07/2005
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