Normalisation and directionality (was: how to add all latin (and greek) subscripts)

From: John Hudson (john@tiro.ca)
Date: Mon Jul 07 2008 - 14:20:06 CDT

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    John H. Jenkins wrote:

    >> what, then, is the distinction between aleph as a "symbol" and the
    >> Hebrew letter?

    > Nothing, really, since U+2135 ALEF SYMBOL is formally a compatibility
    > variant of U+05D0 HEBREW LETTER ALEF and thus will go bye-bye if you
    > normalize using NFKC or NFKD. In practice, the most important thing
    > distinguishing the two is directionality. U+2135 ALEF SYMBOL has
    > directionality L and U+05D0 HEBREW LETTER ALEF has directionality R.

    Allowing normalisation to resolve to a character with different
    directionality seems to me risky. Isn't there a danger of the strong RTL
    directionality of U+05D0 messing up layout if substituted for U+2135 in
    some circumstances?

     From a glyph perspective, the design of these two characters
    legitimately differs, since the symbol characters are often harmonised
    to Latin cap-height, while the traditional height of Hebrew text is
    between Latin cap- and x-height.

    This seems to me a very unwelcome decomposition, but I suppose it is
    frozen thus for all time by stability agreements.

    John Hudson 

    -- 
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