From: Peter Lofting (lofting@apple.com)
Date: Tue Dec 17 2002 - 14:00:52 EST
At 7:32 PM +0100 12/17/02, Marco Cimarosti wrote:
>Once the Tibetan BrdaRten characters are encoded
>in BMP, many current systems supporting ISO/IEC10646 will enable Tibetan
>processing without major modification.
There was an earlier proposal by the Chinese for a pre-composed
Tibetan set (ISO10646-WG2-N964) that I analyzed in Jan 1994. It had
708 character stacks.
It was believed to be from a PC hardware card-based implimentation
that the Chinese posts & telegraph department had early on and was
for supporting colloquial Tibetan plus a bit extra (transliterations
of foreign place names, etc.). The 1994 proposal document was dot
matrix printed and contained some hand-drawn glyphs, indicating that
the PC implementation of that time could not support some chars.
Presumedly the present proposal of 900+ stacks is a maturation of the
same system. And the claim for universality is based on it being able
to typeset everything they have published to-date. The question is
whether that list of texts is representative of the full literary and
linguistic corpus or is only a sub-set?
Could the Chinese be asked to provide detailed information on this
system and the texts that it has published so we can get an idea of
the domain that their stack set covers?
Peter Lofting
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