RE: Questions regarding U+FD3E ORNATE LEFT PARENTHESIS and U+FD3F ORNATE RIGHT PARENTHESIS

From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Sat Dec 08 2007 - 11:20:50 CST

  • Next message: Behnam: "Re: Questions regarding U+FD3E ORNATE LEFT PARENTHESIS and U+FD3F ORNATE RIGHT PARENTHESIS"

    > De : unicode-bounce@unicode.org [mailto:unicode-bounce@unicode.org] De la
    > part de Behnam
    > Envoyé : samedi 8 décembre 2007 16:42
    > À : Kent Karlsson
    > Cc : 'Kenneth Whistler'; karl-pentzlin@acssoft.de; unicode@unicode.org
    > Objet : Re: Questions regarding U+FD3E ORNATE LEFT PARENTHESIS and U+FD3F
    > ORNATE RIGHT PARENTHESIS
    >
    > I don't quite understand what anomality is being discussed here.
    > It is true that ornate parenthesis were used in old fonts, old
    > applications and old formats in text encoding. So was many
    > presentation forms and ligatures!

    What you have not understood is that they are used within Unicode-encoded
    fonts, and used also within old text encodings that have now been mapped
    unambiguously to Unicode.

    If you change this, you'll affect those mappings and all the Unicode-based
    algorithms that are used to handle even those old texts (for which there's
    no interest in reencoding them, due to their huge volume, and the huge
    amount of work it would require to scan and reprocess them, notably if those
    are archives kept unchanged for legal reasons, where any reencoding could
    produce damages).

    With those standardized mappings to Unicode, no change was necessary to
    these old legacy-encoded texts. They remain directly usable with the current
    Unicode-centered technologies through this simple mapping.

    Trying to change the Unicode properties would require changing all those
    algorithms that are used to process these texts.

    So, even if the properties were not ideal, the fact that they have been
    standardized since already about 15 years, means that there really no
    incentive reason to change them. The applications using these texts have
    already been adapted to the situation and can work with the current
    properties, including fonts, renderers, text parsers...



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