At 02:39 PM 12/29/01 +0100, Philipp Reichmuth wrote:
>Admittedly, some directions are
>rather arcane, but believe me, it will be possible to dig up some
>ancient document or other which is written into any odd combination of
>directions. If Unicode wants to achieve complete representation of any
>kind of presentation of text direction here, it's going to be a pretty
>rough job.
Unicode happily settles for covering the must-have common cases for modern
text, in particular those that are needed for modern plain text. One of the
reasons vertical text support has been left out of Unicode is that modern
*plain* text in the languages in question usually is presented
left-to-right horizontally, whereas bidirectional plain text cannot be
presented without explicit support.
Already with bidi, the support for the explicit directionality - required
for plain text - is in danger of colliding with markup solutions for the
same functionality.
The 32 directions from the Omega example belong in markup - not plain text.
A./
PS: as far as ancient writing is concerned, we clearly need a common markup
solution for "capturing the way things look in the original", which can be
based on the plain-text backbone provided by Unicode. The Text Encoding
Initiative (at http://www.tei-c.org/ ) produces The TEI Guidelines:
"detailed recommendations for the encoding of all kinds of textual material
of all kinds in all languages from all times".
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Sat Dec 29 2001 - 21:15:18 EST