Newsgroups: comp.text
Path: utzoo!sq!lee
From: lee@sq.sq.com (Liam R. E. Quin)
Subject: Re: Polyglot List Issue (Really: Does Latin-1 cover Western Europe ?)
Message-ID: <1991Feb11.230331.374@sq.sq.com>
Organization: SoftQuad Inc., Toronto, Canada
References: <1991Feb4.211114.19161@visix.com> <1991Feb5.174923.16236@sq.sq.com> <4366@undis.cs.chalmers.se>
Date: Mon, 11 Feb 91 23:03:31 GMT
Lines: 29

lee@sq.sq.com (Liam R. E. Quin) writes:

> I think also that the distinction between glyph-name (ae-ligature), glyph
> and position in collation sequence must be made clear, especially as
> collating sequence varies from nationality to nationality.  [...]

jeffrey@cs.chalmers.se (Alan Jeffrey) writes:

>Agreed totally---one of the best tests for `is this glyph a separate
>letter or just a decorated form of another letter?' is whether it
>alphabetizes and/or capitalizes differently.

Another important point is that if one were (for example) to use "oe"
instead of the oe-ligature in French, one could no longer set those words
which contain o and e as distinct glyphs, such as `coexistence'.

Perhaps typesetting systems could have a ligature-exception table, which
would prevent such errors -- it's not clear to me.
I don't know of any French words which change in meaning if the oe-ligature
is replaced by "oe", but then I don't know French.  Examples of Dutch IJ
capitalisation (which are correct in all of the atlases I own) have been
provided recently on the net, of course.

Oedipus and Aelfwine don't look at all right to me...!

Lee

-- 
Liam R. E. Quin,  lee@sq.com, SoftQuad Inc., Toronto, +1 (416) 963-8337