From: Andrew West (andrewcwest@gmail.com)
Date: Thu Mar 30 2006 - 03:58:01 CST
On 29/03/06, Kent Karlsson <kent.karlsson14@comhem.se> wrote:
> >
> > The sort of case I am thinking of is that in which a letter L may have
> > two contextual forms, L1 and L2 which are selected in different
> > contexts (e.g. L1 before one set of vowels and L2 before another set
> > of vowels). However, when writing a foreign word L2 is always used,
> > regardless of context.
>
> You are convincing me even more that these variants should have
> been encoded as separate characters, that should have separate
> shaping properties.
There are some things about the Mongolian encoding model that I really
do not like, and which I think go against Unicode's fundamental
encoding principles, but variation selectors are not one of them. Your
suggestion of encoding contextual glyph variants separately goes
against both the character-glyph model and the Mongolian's own sense
of what letters their script is composed of.
Just to reiterate, variation selectors for Mongolian are used sparsely
in ordinary running text as the rendering system can select the
correct glyph form of a letter from context in most cases, and the
user (or IME) only needs to enter a VS when the context is ambiguous
or needs to be overridden.
Incidentally, there are a couple of cases for Mongolian where
variation selectors are used to select simple glyph variants, which I
agree should better have been encoded as separate characters:
U+1880 MONGOLIAN LETTER ALI GALI ANUSVARA ONE
U+1881 MONGOLIAN LETTER ALI GALI VISARGA ONE
In fact, I think that the spurious "ONE" in the names of these
characters must be a relic of an early draft which included MONGOLIAN
LETTER ALI GALI ANUSVARA ONE, MONGOLIAN LETTER ALI GALI ANUSVARA TWO,
MONGOLIAN LETTER ALI GALI VISARGA ONE and MONGOLIAN LETTER ALI GALI
VISARGA TWO (just my hypothesis, but if Ken or anyone can confirm or
deny it ...).
> It's not really too late yet, I think, to deprecate
> the FVSs...
>
Well, yes it is.
Andrew
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