Re: Combining Latin Small Letter A

From: John Hudson (john@tiro.ca)
Date: Thu May 18 2006 - 12:17:59 CDT

  • Next message: Dominikus Scherkl: "Re: Combining Latin Small Letter A"

    theiling@absint.com wrote:

    > While programming a compatibility decomposition plus case folding (two
    > things in one step), I noticed that
    >
    > U+0345 COMBINING GREEK YPOGEGRAMMENI
    > is converted to
    > U+03B9 GREEK SMALL LETTER IOTA
    >
    > but that code positions like
    >
    > U+0363 COMBINING LATIN SMALL LETTER A
    > is not converted to
    > U+0061 LATIN SMALL LETTER A
    >
    > And some similar combining chars accordingly.

    The former is a peculiarity of the Greek writing system, not a general rule for combining
    letter-like marks. The ypogegrammeni is written as a full iota when it follows an
    uppercase letter.

    > Is there a reason for it? This would then result in some letter-like
    > chars not being found when searching for them as a letter.

    But they are not letters, they are combining marks that happen to be based on letters:
    their function is not alphabetical. In general, you don't want them to be confuseable with
    or decomposed to letter characters. The Greek ypogegrameni is an exception, and I believe
    there are case roundtripping issues as a result.

    John Hudson

    -- 
    Tiro Typeworks        www.tiro.com
    Vancouver, BC         john@tiro.ca
    I am not yet so lost in lexicography, as to forget
    that words are the daughters of earth, and that things
    are the sons of heaven.  - Samuel Johnson
    


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