>> But they clearly do not want you to modify anything, including >> character name! Character name is a searchable field, which some >> applications may need. > >It's an English field, for which there is a canonical translation >for French, and there should be translation for other languages.
But, on the unicode stability policy page http://www.unicode.org/unicode/standard/stability_policy.html it says: The character names are used to distinguish between characters, and do not always express the full meaning of each character. They are designed to be used programmatically, and thus must be stable. In some cases the original name chosen to represent the character is inaccurate in one way or another. Any such inaccuracies are dealt with by adding annotations to the character name list (which is printed in the Unicode Standard and provided in a machine-readable format), or by adding descriptive text to the standard. Note: It is possible to produce translated names for the characters, to make the information conveyed by the name accessible to non-English speakers. Hmmm. What does that mean? Are translated names to be "annotations", "descriptions", "character names", or are they maintained in a separate table? How do you use the name programmatically if you don't know the language they are in? I did some googling, but could not find the French trasnlation files. Is there an URL? Jim Penny
