From: Dr.James Austin (jamesvattekkattu1@vsnl.net)
Date: Mon Jan 16 2006 - 14:44:22 CST
----- Original Message -----
From: "Jukka K. Korpela" <jkorpela@cs.tut.fi>
To: Sent: Tuesday, January 10, 2006 3:08 PM
Subject: RE: IJ joint in spaced lettering
> On Mon, 9 Jan 2006, Kenneth Whistler wrote:
>
> >> (Maybe some official statement,
> >> constituting an explicit exception to the principle of avoiding
> >> compatibility decomposable characters, would be in order.)
> >
> > Actually, I don't think so. The bullet at the definition
> > of compatibility decomposable characters already provides
> > sufficient wiggle-room. They are there for:
> >
> > 1. use with legacy data (which includes ISO 8859-1, by the way)
> >
> > 2. when you need them (special circumstances)
>
> Hardly anyone would consider using characters that he does not need, so
> interpreting "special circumstances" as "when you need them" nullifies the
> entire statement about avoiding compatibility decomposable characters.
> Maybe it _should_ be nullified, but I'd rather see that happen as an
> explicit decision in a revision of the standard, and that would also
> require some tuning in other parts of the standard. (For example, saying
> that compatibility characters were included only for compatibility with
> existing standards would then be too strong, or at least misleading.)
>
> > You wouldn't get very far trying to pushing a claim that the
> > Unicode Standard has a principle of "avoiding compatibility
> > decomposable characters",
>
> Well, it has such a principle, in the form of an explicit statement
> that I quoted and "between the lines" in various wordings.
>
> > given that technically, they include
> > even such characters as U+00A0 NO-BREAK SPACE -- which is elsewhere
> > explicitly recommended for use (in special circumstances) for
> > preventing line breaks and for display of nonspacing marks
> > in apparent isolation, and so on.
>
> An explicit recommendation, or permission, in the standard surely
> constitutes an exception to the general rule, but it does not mean
> that the rule does not exist or could be taken lightly.
>
> > I'd say the IJ is a similar case.
>
> Perhaps. Wouldn't it then be suitable to make a note of this?
>
> > U+0132 is encoded for those
> > circumstances where you might need it: interoperating with legacy
> > data (particularly ISO 6937), and special circumstances where you
> > might have requirements for letter spacing that couldn't be
> > met simply in plain text otherwise.
>
> It is a sufficient reason for U+0132 that it existed in other standards.
> Interoperating with legacy data generally constitutes a reason to use
> compatibility characters. But beyond that? If the ij ligature is
> considered as a letter that is part of Dutch orthography, then its use
> would be recommendable, without any "special circumstances". (We would
> then rather say that replacing it by "i" and "j" would be appropriate
> in some circumstances, including situations where U+0132 cannot be
> used safely.) This might be a highly debatable issue, but if there is a
> considerable community that regards the ij ligature as a letter, this
> alone would be a reason to add some comment to U+0132.
>
> --
> Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
>
>
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