From: John Cowan (jcowan@reutershealth.com)
Date: Wed Jul 30 2003 - 13:16:12 EDT
Ted Hopp scripsit:
> Besides, what's all this that I keep reading about Unicode encodes
> characters, not glyphs? From Chapter 1: "[T]he standard defines how
> characters are interpreted, not how glyphs are rendered." The "code what you
> see" approach, while probably the reality of Unicode, seems somewhat
> contrary to this statement of principle.
Some characters are more glyphy than others, to be sure, and combining marks
are explicitly said to be shape-based. But after all, we don't demand that
in encoding English, final silent e be given a different code from that of
any other e, so why should silent vs. pronounced shva be encoded separately?
> > So with Unicode, there is no way to separate even vowels and consonants,
No more is it possible in any encoding when writing English: is "y" a vowel or
a consonant? Depends.
OTOH, we cannot lay down an absolute law. Certain Mongolian letters
are quite indistinguishable visually in some of their contextual forms
(Mongolian is a cursive script like Arabic), but are still encoded
separately in Unicode. There is tension between the various encoding
principles in Unicode, and designing an encoding for any script is a
balancing act.
-- John Cowan jcowan@reutershealth.com www.reutershealth.com www.ccil.org/~cowan "You cannot enter here. Go back to the abyss prepared for you! Go back! Fall into the nothingness that awaits you and your Master. Go!" --Gandalf
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