From: Bob Hallissy (Bob_Hallissy@sil.org)
Date: Mon Jul 04 2005 - 10:21:00 CDT
On 2005-07-03 10:52:44 PM asadek wrote:
>But how would 066E + 065A appear and behave typographically differently
than
>0756? This is after all a character encoding not a pronunciation one.
Ideally, 0756 can accept a vowel combining mark, whereas 066E+065A should
not.
This is not the only situation in Unicode where two sequences *are
different* but don't *look different*
BTW, to take up a previous question of yours:
>Why encode, version of Unicode after version of Unicode,
>new Arabic characters which could be coded as a base and
>a combining mark (why no THREE DOTS ABOVE/TWO DOTS ABOVE)?
SIL thought so too. In fact we made a detailed proposal on just this
approach not very long ago. Part of the rationale for our proposal was
exactly your concern: that it will take a long time for the Arabic
character repertoire to finally be complete. In our opinion it would be
much better to switch to a dynamic composition model including the various
dot patterns, etc., than to have a continuous trickle of new characters
being added to the standard year after year.
However, in the end, the proposal was rejected.
My reason for bringing this up is to let you know that there is no
possibility of further progress in this direction. The technical merits,
costs, and risks of the approach have been fairly presented and evaluated,
and the decision made. There is nothing to be gained at this point from
pushing on this button. It is far better to spend our energies to
document, propose, and thus standardize all the still-needed Arabic
characters.
Bob
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