RE: Level of Unicode support required for various languages

From: Timothy Armes (tarmes@fr.imaje.com)
Date: Thu Oct 25 2007 - 01:21:21 CDT

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    Thank you all for all your anwsers. I now understand that my questions are unanswerable as they stand. Instead, I'll put them into context.

    Our product includes a simple font rendering technology, and we'd now like to render Unicode strings. I like to know the level minimum level of Unicode support that is needed to ensure that we can print strings in the modern languages used by all countries in which we are present.

    Given this minimum level of support, I'd also like to know which modern languages will not be printable, i.e. which future markets would be potentially lost.

    So, I do mean "languages" as opposed to "scripts". However, I'm only talking about modern languages and "everyday texts" - rare Unihan symbols aren't a concern, for example.

    Here is a current list. Can all of these be written without combining marks and variant glyphs?

    English
    Spanish
    German
    Italian
    Portuguese
    Finnish
    Dutch
    Swedish
    Danish
    Greek
    Russian
    Hungarian
    Polish
    Slovenian
    Czech
    Norwegian
    Croatian
    Bulgarian
    Arabic (needs variant glyphs)
    Hebrew
    Farsi
    Chinese
    Taiwanese
    Korean
    Thai
    Vietnamese
    Indonesian
    Turkish
    Brazilian
    Japanese

    Thanks,

    Tim

    -----Message d'origine-----
    De : unicode-bounce@unicode.org [mailto:unicode-bounce@unicode.org]De la
    part de Timothy Armes
    Envoyé : mercredi 24 octobre 2007 10:08
    À : unicode@unicode.org
    Objet : Level of Unicode support required for various languages

    Hi,

    I'm looking for accurate answers to the following questions. I've spent a lot of time trying to find this information but it doesn't appear to be readily available. I'm hoping that someone here can help me.

    1) How many and which languages absolutely require the use of combinging marks due to the fact there the pre-composed glyphs aren't sufficient?

    2) How many and which languages absolutely require the use of variant selectors?

    3) How many and which languages absolutely require the use of variant glyphs?

    Two and three are not quite the same since I believe that Arabic, for example, uses variant glyphs but doesn't need varient selectors (since the glyphs are chosen algorithmically).

    Regards,

    Tim Armes

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