At 02:02 AM 04/25/2000 -0800, Michael Everson wrote:
>Unicode doesn't model languages. It represents
>writing systems, and while imperfect, the model does a very good job.
Unless, as a case of an imperfection in the representation, you are writing
Serbian where there are a few characters that need codepoints different
from the Russian (and other Cyrillic) values so they can be distinguished
from the Russian characters but the committee refuses to issue them since
"They are the 'same' letters as the Russian/Cyrillic ones so you can use
those codepoints".
If you do not remember this issue it has to do with the fact that the
shapes of certain Serbian letters are different from their Russian
Counterparts when using an Italic Font. By assigning separate codepoints
for these characters (and having the keyboards emit the correct codepoint
depending on if you are using a Russian or Serbian mapping), the correct
glyph will thus be displayable without needing to swap glyphs based on
language (they map to the common glyph in non-italic fonts while having
separate glyphs in the italic fonts).
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:21:02 EDT