From: Asmus Freytag (asmusf@ix.netcom.com)
Date: Thu Feb 17 2005 - 18:37:08 CST
At 03:23 PM 2/17/2005, Patrick Andries wrote:
>Asmus Freytag a écrit :
>
>>Your proposal by focusing entirely on the appearance, would negate that
>>aspect.
>
>My "proposal" was dealing only with being able to display PREßBURG with
>the current technology
You proposed that the coding should be SS and that an optional ligature be
used to display an ß glyph that harmonizes with ALL CAPS. In effect that's
equivalent to coding S ZWJ S.
>(your example about applying a title style) I think it is feasible while
>preserving an underlying orthographic representation.
The underlying orthography, and that's where your misunderstanding comes
in, is to preserve the ß *character* in order to distinguish this from the
case where 'SS' is the uppercase of 'ss'.
>I did not propose any solution to insure roundtrip between (lowercase)
>ß <-> SS, a very old problem. I'm not that amibitious ;-) I answered a
>different problem. Sorry for the misunderstanding.
But that's precisely the reason why people are using non-standard spellings
for words like PREßBURG. So a 'solution' that ignores that requirement is
no solution.
The appearance of the ß is a secondary matter; it is correctly identified
as a glyph representation problem by you and others. But it is a
representation of ß, not a representation of SS. Therefore, if we allow the
encoding to represent this distinction it could be <ß, FVS1> but never <S
ZWJ S>.
To drive the argument a bit further: imagine you wanted to show the double
capital S in an politically incorrect manner in the middle of a word.
That's sometimes done for effect in political cartoons and similar forms of
writing. Assume that you wanted to realize that using character encoding
and font technology in a systematic way. That would be a situation where
you would have a special SS ligature and the underlying encoding could be
<S ZWJ S>. I don't recommend that you actually do that, but it's the type
of situation, "alternate form for the character sequence SS" that would be
well-supported by your proposed approach.
Cheers,
A./
>>You've convinced me that there would be a benefit for Unicode in this
>>arena, so as to help people arrive at an unambiguous underlying representation.
>
>Happy to have contributed ;-)
PS: you're welcome ! ;-)
A./
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