From: Peter Constable (petercon@microsoft.com)
Date: Fri Dec 05 2003 - 20:12:54 EST
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Kenneth Whistler [mailto:kenw@sybase.com]
> But it is decidely wrong to take
> what has all along been the unmarked/lowercase glottal stop,
If they have been using it as unmarked case, how can one say that it is
unmarked/lowercase rather than unmarked/uppercase?
> reinterpret it as an *uppercase* glottal stop and introduce
> a new lowercase glottal stop. *That* would result in endless
> confusion and in data corruption.
Actually, I think (and said a week ago or whenever) that leaving 0294 as
lowercase and adding a new cap-height uppercase was more likely to lead
to confusion and data corruption: the code charts show 0294 as cap
height, and a new character would also show as cap height; data where an
unmarked-case character is needed would have both 0294 and the new
character mixed together; some fonts would contain cap-height glyphs for
0294 (while some would use x-height glyphs), and users would get
confused and frustrated as a result.
For those situations in which unmarked-case glottal has been used, I
think it would cause the least confusion to leave 0294 as a cap-height
glyph, and call it upper case.
> Look at the text of Pullum and Ladusaw, p. 211. All those
> x-height forms are simply glyph variants.
But have people been using 0294 as an x-height character? Most likely
not in cases where an upper/lower distinction is used (they would have
been using some custom legacy encoding). Of unmarked-case situations,
x-height glyphs are not commonly used in phonetic transcription, that
I'm aware of, and are never required. So, if they used a x-height glyph
before and end up with a cap height, the data is still equally valid and
legible. The only potential problems would boil down to orthographies
with unmarked-case glottal that have encoded data in Unicode and that
have used 0294 but explicitly require an x-height glyph. Not too likely,
methinks, and whatever problem exists would be contained to only that
pre-existing data. The confusion from the alternative, having a cap and
a lowercase that can be displayed like a cap, would remain forever.
Peter
Peter Constable
Globalization Infrastructure and Font Technologies
Microsoft Windows Division
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Dec 05 2003 - 20:51:29 EST