Newsgroups: comp.std.internat Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watdragon!rose.waterloo.edu!ccplumb From: ccplumb@rose.waterloo.edu (Colin Plumb) Subject: Re: Unicode vs ISO DIS 10646 (was universality of Latin-1) Message-ID: <1991May5.064852.12971@watdragon.waterloo.edu> Sender: news@watdragon.waterloo.edu (News Owner) Organization: University of Waterloo References: <1991May4.180549.29162@voa3.VOA.GOV> <124144@unix.cis.pitt.edu> Date: Sun, 5 May 1991 06:48:52 GMT Lines: 28 I'm not a great linguist (English, French, and German), but I also like separate accents because it's so much easier to accomodate wierd uses. Mathematicians put funny accents over and under every letter in creation. Ever played with rho-hat? Linguists and phoneticists may do the same. And it's such a bother enumerating all the legal possibilities. There's a CCITT standard which I can't seem to locate right now that uses non-spacing accents, and it seems like the right thing to me. Yess, e-acute is conceptually one thing in French, but qu and ph are pretty distinct entities in English, and I can't say for sure how different o-umlaut is from oe in German. Mc and Mac have been special-cased in many places in English (the correct all-caps spelling of McDonald's is McDONALD'S), with superscript c's being common. It's pretty impossible to come up with a character standard that only lets you do sensible things. All I can suggest is, don't do the senseless ones. Treat accented characters as double-byte characters (recognizable by the first byte) if the accents are inseparable, but don't if they can be logically separated. The CCITT standard also specifies a subset of the possible combinations that are required to be displayable, but the usual cheap implementation is probably accents plus some sort of character-height information, while a higher-rent scheme uses some dedicated pairs, with fallback to the former. Separate accents makes the low-cost scheme much easier, without seriously hampering the higher-cost one. Good typesetting systems already handle ligatures and kerning as is. -- -Colin