From: Ed Trager (ed.trager@gmail.com)
Date: Tue Jun 17 2008 - 11:20:18 CDT
On Tue, Jun 17, 2008 at 5:19 AM, Dagvadorj Galbadrakh
<dagvadorj@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello dear list members,
>
> I have been checking out the Mongolian characters in the latest version of
> Unicode. The range is between 1800 and 18AF.
> Unfortunately, I have explored some serious errors.
>
> There are perhaps no middle and final forms of the characters.
> Mongolian characters have variations depending on its location within a
> word, same situation as in the Arabic script.
In principle Unicode encodes letters, not glyph forms such as medial
or final glyph forms.
In the case of Arabic, standards existed before Unicode which encoded
isolated, initial, medial, final and numerous ligated letter forms
separately. Unicode was therefore obligated to encode numerous arabic
contextual glyph forms in order to insure round-trip compatability
when converting legacy data to Unicode. However, if you examine (the
hex values of ...) Arabic text on the world wide web, you will see
that the text predominantly consists of plain Unicode text formed from
the unicode values for the basic Arabic letters -- and thus adheres to
the higher Unicode principle of encoding letters and not glyph forms.
The contextual glyph forms that you see on screen are generated by the
computer's text layout engine intelligently querying an OpenType font
for the correct contextual glyph forms to create the correct
presentation.
Mongolian is designed to work exactly the same way : letters, not
contextual glyph forms are encoded. To get the proper display of
Mongolian, you will need to have the right version of the layout
engine ("Uniscribe" on Windows) and a good Mongolian OpenType font.
If things do not look right, it could be a problem with either the
layout engine or the font, or a combination of both. Here, for
example, is an article discussing how to resolve a problem with
Mongolian rendering on Vista which may or may not apply in your case:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929763
> I couldn't find middle and final forms of most of the characters. And as I
> tried them (at least on Windows XP), it doesn't automatically converts to
> its middle/final form when it is typed after a character without space.
> Please note that I have no experience on how Windows Vista regulated it,
> though, I think it should be possible for Windows XP.
> Most of the basic character (called 'shüd' in Mongolian) is not found.
> It maybe is 1807 (MONGOLIAN SIBE SYLLABLE BOUNDARY MARKER) as it is supposed
> to be. But it seems to be NOT it is supposed to be as I try to type it after
> a character: it seems a bit longer than the original character is.
>
> Could somebody please inform me on that?
>
>
> Best Regards
> Dagvadorj GALBADRAKH
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