Re: [9fans] combining characters

["Lluís Batlle i Rossell" <viriketo@gmail.com>]

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Francisco J Ballesteros wrote:
> I think that á is just a single rune, not two different ones composed. If
> to type them, you have to type several keys, it´s just a keyboard issue,
> isn´t it? I don´t understand why this could go to a upper layer. Is there
> any other problem? (besides having to use utf8 for i/o, I mean).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combining_diacritical_mark

Think about languages having many diacritical marks (Arabic, Annamese, 
Kannada,...), not only about Spanish. Wouldn't you feel there is too 
much 'duplicated' information in those glyphs of that small 16bit space?

Even more... there's the problem about _linking_ characters according to 
context, like in Arabic and at least some Indian languages. From Wikipedia:
"The Arabic alphabet can be encoded using several character sets, 
including ISO-8859-6 and Unicode, in the latter thanks to the "Arabic 
segment", entries U+0600 to U+06FF. However, neither of these sets 
indicate the form each character should take in context. It is left to 
the rendering engine to select the proper glyph to display for each 
character."

And after solving the screen output of unicode for diacritical marks and 
linking, maybe there'll be work to be done for the input.

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