-----Original Message-----
>On Sun, Jul 04, 1999 at 07:40:04AM -0700, Jeroen Hellingman wrote:
>> The semantics of both i and j should be that
>> they loose their dots if you put an accent on top of them, so there never
>> should be a problem.
>
>How do you make a j lose its dot if you do not have a dotless j available?
>I don't get it. It would seem to make sense to me to bend the rules in this
>case and have a dotless j even if it is a glyph and not a character used
>by any language.
Well, it may be required as a glyph in the font, but not as a character in
the
character set, those things are very different, and there is no one-on-one
relation between them, although users of English may be very much spoiled
with their simple alphabet (for which they pay by having complicated
spelling)
>If we really want to convince all programmers to use Unicode, we can hardly
>insist that they add low level code to every single program they write to
>remove the dot from the j by directly manipulating the fonts.
Most programs will not need to bother at all, as it will be handled by the
text formatting API, they will get for free. You will not expect to add code
to every single program to handle Arabic or Devanagari script, and these are
far more complicated than removing a dot from a i or j.
>Wouldn't it be considerably simpler to just add a dotless j to the Unicode
>standard so that font designers become motivated to include it in the
>fonts?
No, it is a glyph, and not a character entity in itself (and even if, in
some odd variant of
IPA, it could be found as a character, I would still promote using the j
(with dot) always, except for that specific role). You also don't want to
add all the conjunct characters used in Indian scripts... (and we are very
sadly stuck with loads of contextual shapes of arabic
letters, which are surely a useless balast in the standard)
Fonts should contain the glyphs required to print a script, not the
characters defined
to encode it.
>Adam
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