From: Lucio De Re <lucio@proxima.alt.za>
To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
Subject: Re: [9fans] A simple question
Date: Fri, 11 Jul 2003 08:11:13 +0200 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <20030711081111.H7106@cackle.proxima.alt.za> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <00f601c34772$215ea340$b9844051@insultant.net>; from boyd, rounin on Fri, Jul 11, 2003 at 08:03:20AM +0200
On Fri, Jul 11, 2003 at 08:03:20AM +0200, boyd, rounin wrote:
>
> well if unicode was organised so that each language had its own
> code space it would be a trivial problem.
>
Well, I'm assuming a total rewrite of the alphabets anyway. Although
ideograms really don't fit in the same representation space.
> look at latin 1 (for want of a better term): it covers a whole bunch
> of languages, with different collation sequences and many of the
> glyphs are not actually _real letters_.
>
Yes, that's where composition came into the picture. But that
needs to be clever, with character scaling to make room for accents
becoming more than a trivial nuisance. Technically, it doesn't
matter what a symbol stands for, as much as it needs to be _presented_
in an unambiguous, clear fashion.
Whether it's a pronunciation issue or a distinct character (is the
final letter in "papa" and "papà" a pronunciation aid or a different
character in the sense of differentiating words with different
meanings?) is not important to its internal or external repreentation.
But I do get your point that overlaps of alphabets for different
languages does add complexity. Maybe there is enough scope in
UTF-8 or Unicode to allow many-to one internal to external mappings.
The existence of a phonetic alphabet is a different issue, too vast
to address here (without composition capabilities, specially).
Suffice to say even in Plan 9 there are fonts that do not have all
the useful glyphs in them, so whereas UTF-8 is a great abstraction
for internal purposes, there should be a more definite standard
about externalising it.
++L
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2003-07-11 6:11 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 34+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2003-07-09 13:20 ron minnich
2003-07-10 3:59 ` Russ Cox
2003-07-10 5:37 ` Tad Hunt
2003-07-10 6:46 ` boyd, rounin
2003-07-10 11:14 ` ron minnich
2003-07-10 14:46 ` jmk
2003-07-10 16:32 ` Dan Cross
2003-07-10 16:37 ` boyd, rounin
2003-07-10 18:13 ` jmk
2003-07-10 19:13 ` boyd, rounin
2003-07-10 23:47 ` Bruce Ellis
2003-07-11 14:59 ` ron minnich
2003-07-10 17:15 ` Tad Hunt
2003-07-10 11:11 ` ron minnich
2003-07-10 11:31 ` Lucio De Re
2003-07-10 12:03 ` David Presotto
2003-07-10 14:14 ` boyd, rounin
2003-07-10 14:08 ` Lucio De Re
2003-07-10 14:24 ` David Presotto
2003-07-10 14:25 ` Lucio De Re
2003-07-10 15:06 ` boyd, rounin
2003-07-10 15:09 ` Jack Johnson
2003-07-11 4:41 ` Lucio De Re
2003-07-11 6:03 ` boyd, rounin
2003-07-11 6:11 ` Lucio De Re [this message]
2003-07-11 6:59 ` boyd, rounin
2003-07-11 8:13 ` northern snowfall
2003-07-11 16:10 ` Jack Johnson
2003-07-12 0:29 ` northern snowfall
2003-07-11 23:33 ` boyd, rounin
2003-07-10 15:09 ` rog
-- strict thread matches above, loose matches on Subject: below --
2002-09-19 19:36 [9fans] a " presotto
2002-09-19 19:34 Charles Forsyth
2002-09-19 18:55 yan zhao
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