Re: [9fans] Woes of New Language Support

[Jack Johnson <knapjack@gmail.com>]

If I'm reading you right, you're saying it might be easier if
everything were encoded as combining (or maybe more aptly
non-combining) codes, regardless of language?

So, we might encode 'Waffles' as w+upper a f f l e s and let the
renderer (if there is one) handle the presentation of the case shift
and the potential ligature, but things like grep get noticeably easier
with no overlap of ő and o+umlaut.

Again, oversimplified, with no real understanding on my part of the
depth or breadth of the problem space.

If this is the case, could it be handled by pushing everything into a
subset of unicode rather than use the unallocated space to create a
superset?

-J

On 7/26/09, erik quanstrom <quanstro@quanstro.net> wrote:
>> to be fair to the unicode people, this decoupling of glyphs and codepoints
>> is (i think) the most straightforward way to implement some languages like
>> arabic, where the glyphs for characters depend on their position within a
>> word.  that is, a letter at the beginning of a word looks different from
>> what it would look like if it was in the middle.
>
> my opinion (not that i'm entitled to one here) is
> that the unicode guys screwed up.  unicode is not
> consistant.  explain why there are two code points sigma.
> 03c3	greek small letter sigma
> 03c2	greek small letter final sigma
> why does german get ä, ö, ü?  if you want to take
> this further, why are there capital forms of latin letters?
> can't that also be inferred by the font?
>
> what's called a ligature in one language is a character
> in another.  i see no consistency.  it seems like the
> unicode committee had a problem with too much
> knowledge of the specific problems and few actual
> unifying (sorry) concepts.
>
> i think it would make much more sense to put this logic
> in editors.  this would also allow the freedom to use a
> capital, ligature, final form in the wrong place.
> like say studlyCaps.  i can't imagine english is the only
> language in the world that gets abused.
>
> - erik
>
>

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