From: Gregg Reynolds (unicode@arabink.com)
Date: Sat Jul 02 2005 - 10:14:34 CDT
asadek@st-elias.com wrote:
> N. Ganesan <naa.ganesan@gmail.com> wrote :
>
>>What about Arabic script? The Middle East
>>awash with funds and resources, and the script is in a
>>wide area by lots of people. If
>>"Unicode happens to also do serious damage
>>to the entire world of right-to-left languages",
>
>
> Scripts.
No, language communities that use the scripts.
>
>
>>is there a competition? Any 16-bit encodings
>>for Arabic script other than Unicode?
>
>
> I don't think so. But what is so damaging about this?
1. Cost of implementing bidi support, which is unecessary for
monolingual software. This indirect tax affects all language
communities that use RTL writing systems.
2. Conceptual errors in the legacy encodings adopted by Unicode, which
means software needs a bunch of expensive logic in order to support the
kind of text manipulation that an Arabic speaker might "naturally"
expect. E.g. fathatan/dammatan/kasratan. (This may not apply to other
languages.) It's conceivable that this situation could be remedied with
appropriate proposals for Unicode.
3. Traditional Arabic sorting (based on radicals) is impossible in any
legacy encoding.
-gregg
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