Re: Using combining diacritical marks and non-zero joiners in a name

From: Jukka K. Korpela (jkorpela@cs.tut.fi)
Date: Fri Apr 18 2008 - 12:34:19 CDT

  • Next message: Asmus Freytag: "Re: Using combining diacritical marks and non-zero joiners in a name"

    Andreas Prilop wrote:

    > Internet Explorer shows two identical À and two identical à
    >
    > À = À à = à
    >
    > but Firefox does not.
    >
    > That was my point.

    But what's the point behind that?

    When you use a combining diacritic mark, programs may deal with it in
    several ways:

    1) render the base character and the diacritic, positioned by the
    principles outlined by the Unicode Consortium, aimed at producing good
    quality for all possible combinations of base characters and diacritics

    2) render the base character and overprint it with the diacritic at a
    fixed position, often resulting in poor or very poor presentation

    3) render the combination using a precomposed glyph, when available in a
    font; note: the combination need not correspond to a precomposed
    _character_

    4) internally convert the combination to a precomposed character (when
    applicable) and render it.

    Is there any reason why any of these would be _wrong_? Surely (2) means
    poor quality, but I'd say it's just that, not incorrectness. And (4) is
    something that the Unicode Standard fairly explicitly permits:
    applications may well treat canonically equivalent sequences as the
    same.

    Jukka K. Korpela ("Yucca")
    http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/



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