Dr Andrew C Aitchison wrote on 2002-01-24 18:06 UTC: > A simpler example is that 'A' and 'a' are the same character, but > different glyphs. If Unicode was being even-handed, it would > include one but not both of these glyphs, and application software > would have to calculate which glyph to use each time the character > was drawn.
Unicode just tries to find an encoding that has a rather close relationship with keystroke sequences on keyboards to enter text, as this leads naturally to more intuitive editing and substring searching interfaces (think about Ctrl-S in Emacs!). Arabic keyboard users do not distinguish initial, middle or final forms of letters, therefore neither does Unicode. Latin keyboard users distinguish a and A, and so does Unicode. > This example shows how biased Unicode is towards Latin characters. If you think a bit more about it, you'll realize that your conclusion is wrong. Actually, at least as far as the position of combining characters is concerned, Unicode is biased against Latin users. Markus -- Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK Email: mkuhn at acm.org, WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/> _______________________________________________ I18n mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/i18n