Curtis Clark scripsit:
> 1. Precomposed accented characters, I have read, are included in support of
> legacy character sets; the ideal is to use a combining accent with a
> non-accented character.
Just so.
> 2. There are issues with combining accents needing to account for the
> height of the base letter, dots, as well, no doubt, as ascenders and
> descenders. These are semantic issues, which should be handled by the
> software.
I don't know what you mean by "semantic". They are *rendering* issues,
which must be handled by displaying-and-printing software. Much
other software doesn't care a bit. For example, you can write
Java code with comments and identifier names in Yoruba, using combining
characters as needed.
> 3. Unicode, it is said, is a plain text standard.
So it is.
> (2) and (3) seem to be at odds, unless programs that display plain text
> become a lot more sophisticated.
So they must, if they are to handle all of Unicode: BIDI, conjoining
Hangul jamo, etc. etc. This is the escape from your dilemma.
--
John Cowan cowan@ccil.org
I am a member of a civilization. --David Brin
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