From: Kent Karlsson (kent.karlsson14@comhem.se)
Date: Sat Jun 17 2006 - 05:10:00 CDT
John Hudson wrote:
> >>Yes, and to solve the German problem you want to force
> >>everyone else to perform this kind of text encoding hacks.
>
> > No, not at all. Only you seem to suggest that.
>
> Andreas did specifically say that if e.g. English users want
> the form of opening quotation
> mark used for U+2018 in Verdana then they should encode the
> opening quote as U+201B. I'm
> not just suggesting that. This is what he wrote:
>
> Actually, I have seen such quotation marks in English-language
> books printed in Britain and the USA. But, as I wrote, they are
> certainly not preferred. *If* you want such quotation marks,
> then please use U+201B for them!
I don't see any resemblance with what Andreas wrote and your
(gross mis)interpretation.
> >>or providing language-specific glyph variants.
>
> > No thanks. That is bound to fail.
>
> There is no reason why it should other than laziness on the
> part of application
> developers. There has been a robust font-side solution for a
> decade now and there are
> thousands of OpenType fonts language system tags and <locl>
> variant lookups.
As you say, applications tend not to implement that (for good reasons).
In any case, font setting is inherently fragile, and is therefore
inherently
unrobust.
> >>which has the same encoding as the Arabic comma but is a
> >>mirrored form of the Latin comma. There is neither a need nor a
> >>desire for separate encoding for these glyph variants.
>
> > I think very much that is desired. Otherwise we could use just plain
> > ASCII comma for the Arabic comma, Armenian comma, and Ideographic
> > comma.
>
> Let me rephrase: there appears to have been no interest from
> Sindhi computing experts
> (there is an active community) in proposing a Sindhi
> character for encoding. There are
Then I suggest you help them by saying that this is not a glyph variant,
and either propose a new character or propose making ASCII comma bidi
mirrored (but I don't think the latter is the best option).
> also differences to Sindhi shaping of some Arabic letters,
> but there also seems to be
> little interest from the user community in proposing these as
> separate characters.
ArabicShaping properties are normative, so if "shaping" here refers
to joining behaviour one would either need to use ZWJ/ZWNJ or
some other ("new") characters. It is NOT a matter of some fonts
implementing different joining behaviour. (If "shaping" here refers
to something else, then please say what it refers to.)
> especially fonts for a screen environment, have chosen to use
> what even the Unicode
> standard identifies as a 'glyph variant' of U+2018 *as* a
> glyph form for U+2018.
I think it would be better if 201B was NOT identified as a glyph
variant of anything, and that for 2018 one never use the form of 201B.
/kent k
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