Jungshik Shin wrote:
> IMHO, their use of 'support' (for Hangul Jamo and various
> S&SE Asian scripts) goes beyond the flexibility limit I perceive the
> word to have. [...]
I agree: in their list of supported languages, many "yes"'s should by
"partially" or "yes but...".
However, I think that UniPad remains a very nice piece of software, and I am
confident that they will finally reach full support of all scripts. But
consider that it is a low-priority job, because it gives no income to the
company producing it, so allow them to take their time.
Currently, I see UniPad as a sort of "debugging editor", i.e. a tools for
inspecting the details of the encoding without the "obfuscation" of
complex-script display transformations.
I hope that this "low level view" will remain as an option even when full
complex scripts will be implemented. When programming, it is sometimes
useful to have the possibility of temporarily disabling all the complexity
of Unicode display (bidirectionality, combining glyphs, ligatures, format
controls, etc.), and be able to interact with the crude code points.
> > UniPad does include glyphs for individual jamos as
> > well as precomposed Hangul syllables, which is more than most
> > non-Korean-specific TrueType fonts can offer.
>
> Which is still far from supporting Hangul Jamos.
This is true. But they also claim that they support "Conversion to
Precomposed Characters" (see
http://www.unipad.org/techinfo/features/sub_general.html). If this is
correctly implemented also for Hangul syllables, one could see it as a very
rudimentary support of modern Korean. OK still quite far from the real
thing, anyway.
By the way, I never saw a proper johab system in action, and I cannot figure
out how certain details are supposed to work.
For instance, what should the combining jamos look like while they are being
typed?
- E.g., imagine I am writing <m-> <a> <-r> <k-> <o>: what should the initial
<m-> look like while I haven't yet entered the vowel?
- And what happens when I add vowel <a>: does it immediately form syllable
<ma> or does it wait to see if a trailing consonant follows?
I also wonder whether and how it is possible to edit the components of a
completed syllable.
- Can I go on syllable <ma> and overtype the <m-> with another consonant?
- Can I delete the <m-> leaving a stand-alone vowel? And, in this case, what
does the <a> look like: is the consonant's slot left empty, or is it filled
by some sort placeholder?
- And what does the cursor look like during these operations?
- Does the cursor highlight the proper parts of the syllable, or is the
syllable temporarily converted into a series of spacing glyphs?
_ Marco
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Aug 27 2002 - 11:27:09 EDT