Re: [9fans] Woes of New Language Support

[erik quanstrom <quanstro@quanstro.net>]

On Sun Jul 26 10:14:51 EDT 2009, tlaronde@polynum.com wrote:
> On Sun, Jul 26, 2009 at 09:48:23AM -0400, erik quanstrom wrote:
> >
> > 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
>
> They are distinct in ancient greek at least. The glyph is not the same
> whether the letter is inside or at the end of a word. (At the beginning,
> in ancient greek, there was indeed no blanks between words but just a
> stream of chars...)
>
> Or perhaps did I misunderstand what you wrote.

yes they are.

but we're arguing in the odd, odd world of codepoints.  code points
quite pointedly have no cannonical glyph.  this is why unicode often
does not distinguish final forms and other ligatures.

it bothers me that the exception seems to be for western languages.
all the glyphs that one needs for most western languages are already
there.  such strange ligatures as there are like ffl are just not important
enough to bother with (u+fb03 for those following along at home).

- erik