From: Peter Constable (petercon@microsoft.com)
Date: Wed May 26 2004 - 15:37:10 CDT
> From: Peter Kirk [mailto:peterkirk@qaya.org]
> Sent: Wednesday, May 26, 2004 1:08 PM
> >Legibility is *one* consideration. Certainly we must use it
consistently
> >wrt PH as for other cases. But now that we have established what that
> >means (some people find PH used for Hebrew text to be illegible, so
> >distinct encoding *may* be warranted), we don't need to refer to
Fraktur
> >any further to apply it to PH.
> If we can all agree that legibility is not a sufficient criterion on
its
> own for encoding Phoenician and Palaeo-Hebrew separately, then let's
> indeed move on and see if there are any other technical arguments for
> separate encoding. I don't remember seeing any.
Saying that legibility is not a sufficient criterion does not imply that
it is irrelevant or non technical. The *only* conclusion we can make
from the preceding is that there is no reason whatsoever to continue
discussing Fraktur when what we are really trying to make decisions on
is PH. And, since legibility is a technical criterion (non-sufficient,
but still a necessary consideration), even if there are no *other*
reasons, your conclusion
> This seems to suggest to
> me that there is no technical justification for the proposal.
is invalid. For that reason, and because I believe others have provided
additional technical reasons, my own response to the question
> Can we agree on that?
is "no".
> If so, we need to ask a more general question: should the UTC encode
> scripts for which there is a (small, in this case) demand but no
> technical justification?
We can ask that question, but I don't think it can be fairly applied to
this situation. You say there is no technical justification, but there
are technical issues that the pro-unification camp has not yet, that
I've noticed, responded to after repeated requests. You continue to
insist that the demand is small based on the premise that only a few
individuals on this list have said they have a need -- but there are
often no more than a small number of members of a user community for a
given script or characters subscribed to this list, and the number of
pro-unification and anti-unification opinions that have been voiced here
by people claiming to be part of the user community(ies) is not
significantly different.
Peter
Peter Constable
Globalization Infrastructure and Font Technologies
Microsoft Windows Division
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed May 26 2004 - 15:38:20 CDT