On Mon, 5 Jul 1999 04:28:13 -0700 (PDT), Michael Everson wrote:
>Ar 12:12 -0700 1999-07-04, scríobh Torsten Mohrin:
>
>>To remove the dot is the job of the operating system (or better: GUI)
>>with its display engine (font management, character rendering). This
>>engine has to select a 'dotless j' glyph from its glyph collection
>>("font") to combine it with a circumflex even if 'dotless j' does not
>>exist as a character in Unicode.
>
>I think that complex Arabic and Indic shaping behaviour is a fine thing.
>Requiring it for Latin to remove a _dot_ seems a bit much to me.
Okay, maybe it's a bit overkill to implement a mechanism that changes
the shape of a base character depending on the applied combining mark
only to handle 'dotless j'.
IMO, the purpose of software is not only to implement well defined and
broadly applicable rules, but also to handle very special cases and
exceptions from the rules. When I write software, I spend a lot of my
time handling special cases.
There are a lot of other special cases that have to be handled
properly in software (if required): the uppercase mapping of German
'sharp s', the case mappings of Turkish 'dot[less|full] i', the
handling of the tab character, proper rendering of enclosing diactrics
and much more, I guess.
Torsten
-- Torsten Mohrin Sharmahd Computing GmbH, Hannover, Germany Phone: +49-511-13780, Fax: +49-511-13450 http://www.sharmahd.com, mohrin@sharmahd.com
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