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From: ath@linkoping.telesoft.se (Anders Thulin)
Newsgroups: comp.text
Subject: Re: Polyglot List Issue (Really: Does Latin-1 cover Western Europe ?)
Message-ID: <725@castor.linkoping.telesoft.se>
Date: 3 Feb 91 07:28:02 GMT
References: <1991Jan29.200653.23928@sq.sq.com> <723@castor.linkoping.telesoft.se> <1991Feb1.231640.3959@visix.com>
Organization: TeleSoft AB, Linkoping, Sweden
Lines: 24

In article <1991Feb1.231640.3959@visix.com> amanda@visix.com (Amanda Walker) writes:
>I object to the idea of leaving out <oe> because it is "unnecessary."
>It is still useful, especially when representing printed texts
>accurately.  In a similar vein, I'd like to see glyphs for "long s,"
>ligatures such as "ct," "st," and so on, without having to resort
>to private encodings.

Of course it is useful - I'm not saying it isn't. It's the degree of
usefulness I'm interested in.

Your examples gives additional light on the topic: is the long s
useful to suficiently many people that it should be placed in a 8-bit
code set?  My reply is no. Similarly with ct, st, ffi, fi, and the
rest. They can equally well be represented by the expanded versions.
Only a very small class of people (textual critics) will be
interested, but I believe they have other and better ways of coping
with problems like these.

So, I am asking again: is the <oe> in French only one of these special
ligatures that convey no extra information, or is it a separate
character that *must* be included if the code table should be of any
use for French texts? -- 
Anders Thulin       ath@linkoping.telesoft.se 
Telesoft Europe AB, Teknikringen 2B, S-583 30 Linkoping, Sweden