From: Richard Wordingham (richard.wordingham@ntlworld.com)
Date: Wed Jul 06 2005 - 21:57:26 CDT
Kenneth Whistler wrote:
> The situation for diacritical extension of basic Arabic letters
> is a complex one involving decades of existing encoding practice
> at this point, long preceding the development of Unicode. It also
> involves complex issues of stabilization of of data under
> normalization, as well as model issues for the implementation of
> rendering.
An explanation of why the scheme wouldn't work is, I'm sure, what Ashraf is
looking for. If rendering presented insuperable practical issues, rather
than theoretical issues, that would be an adequate reason for abandoning the
idea. The scheme is being put forward not for theoretical tidiness, but as
a way of having large numbers of characters immediately available. If they
can't be rendered, the scheme is a non-starter.
The Latin alphabet precedent is not promising - diacritics combine badly in
many fonts. There is a technical note on how to display them
(http://www.unicode.org/notes/tn2/), but it didn't seem to me that it could
be implemented in OpenType other than possibly by massive tables. I may be
wrong, but it looks as though it may be extremely laborious to position
Hebrew holam properly on all Latin consonants.
On a related issue (RTL support) - when should we expect Uniscribe or its
successor to support Phoenician (due in Unicode 5.0)? Should I expect to
have to upgrade from Windows XP? (I appreciate that the simplest solution
may well be to encode as Hebrew and style as Phoenician via a font.)
Richard.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Jul 06 2005 - 22:03:19 CDT