From: Pim Blokland (pblokland@planet.nl)
Date: Sat May 24 2003 - 10:11:08 EDT
Karl Pentzlin schreef:
> Is this true:
> "Dutch 'ij' is (besides its special casing rule) by no means more
a
> 'single character' than e.g. Slovak 'ch'. It is encoded in
Unicode
> only for historic reasons (like backward compatibility).
Well, in some ways, the ij DOES act like a letter. For instance, its
titlecase version is IJ, not Ij. (That is, a word such as "ijver" is
written as "IJver" when at the start of a sentence.) Encoding it as a
single codepoint makes this easier to implement.
(On the other hand, this makes the process of sorting less trivial.
Sorting routines should treat U+0133 as two letters, much like the
"legacy" ligatures U+FB01 fi and U+FB02 fl.)
> In the era of automatic ligating (OpenType etc.), no Dutch
speaker
> really needs U+0132/U+0133 or misses an 'ij' key on their
keyboard."
> - Karl
That is true; typing i and j is a lot easier than Alt+0307, or
whatever method the system has for inputing it.. Besides, lots of
classical fonts don't have an ij glyph.
Pim Blokland
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