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From: daniels@parc.xerox.com (Andy Daniels)
Newsgroups: comp.std.internat
Subject: Re: universality of Latin-1
Message-ID: <1991Apr24.181121.6212@parc.xerox.com>
Date: 24 Apr 91 18:11:21 GMT
References: <1991Apr10.172756.4991@murdoch.acc.Virginia.EDU> <1991Apr12.001902.9260@timessqr.gc.cuny.edu> <1991Apr12.123302.17817@murdoch.acc.Virginia.EDU>
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In article <1991Apr12.123302.17817@murdoch.acc.Virginia.EDU> rja7m@calico.cs.Virginia.EDU (Ran Atkinson) writes:
>UNICODE isn't a sufficient solution as it doesn't fully support (for
>example) Vietnamese.  DIS 10646 is a sufficient solution.
>

Sufficient for you, perhaps, but not for me. By your criteria, DIS
10646 doesn't support Rhade, a close neighbor of Vietnamese, nor does
it support Navajo. Moving away from Latin, where's Tamil? where's
Tibetan?

If you're looking for your favorite combination of Latin character +
applied accents as a single character in Unicode, you've missed the
point. Just about all such combination that you find in there are
included as a result of political compromise. The "pure Unicode"
approach is that if you want, for instance, 'A' with a circumflex and
underdot, you emit exactly those three characters - it's up to your
rendering software to display the composite glyph correctly. (That's
funny, I seem to have described a Vietnamese character that Unicode
"doesn't support.")

One can argue endlessly (in fact, people do) about just which set of
characters are "base" letters and which are applied marks, but the
situation in the real world is that new characters are formed in the
Latin (and to some extent) Cyrillic scripts by putting random marks on
other characters that already exist. If you try to enumerate all of
the legal possibilities, you're bound to have somebody come up to you
the day after you've sent your standard to the publisher and tell you,
"but you don't have e-diaresis-rude." You can try to include
optimizations for your favorite set, but you will then invariably
offend the people who use the first ones you've left out.

		-- Andy. --