From: Andrew Cunningham (lang.support@gmail.com)
Date: Sun Nov 16 2008 - 15:36:11 CST
To add to JUkka's comment, if UTC were to accept precomposed characters,
which languages would benefit? the languages with sufficient number of
technical users or agencies that would be in a position to submit a
proposal.
Minority languages would still be forced to use combining diacritics, at
least until soemone came along at some stage to write a proposal for the
needed characters. And if most langauges are supported by precomposed
glyphs, which commercial vendors will bother with the complaxities and time
and resources needed to add combining diacritic support, when most of their
customers may not need it?
Have a look at the available fonts that have wide coverage of combining
diacritic support across the Latin script. Most are open source, a few are
free but copyrighted, And at least one is shareware.
OK there are Microsoft's updated core fonts on Vista, but there have various
problems with designes, and at least for African langauges, once you take
glyph variation and diacritic combinations supported into acount the number
of suitable fonts may drop to 1 or 0.
The principals of combining diacritics have been in Unicode a long time. But
support has bene very slow in coming. I don' expect support by commerical
vendors for adopting new precomposed characters for minority alngauges to be
any quicker.
Andrew
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