On Mon, Jun 14, 2004 at 08:43:38AM -0700, Elvis Presley wrote:

..[snip]..

> Comparing characters would be easy, they compare as
> unsigned integers, but sorting them would be a
> problem, because you'd want to group all the
> (accented) vowels together, according to language
> specific rules. In Greek, this wouldn't be a problem,
> because monotonic vowels and polytonic vowels, though
> occupying different code ranges, are not mixed in the
> same word: they are essentially different languages. A
> 'tonos' is not a 'oxia' or a 'varia'.

  Actually, "tonos" and "oxia" are treated as equivalents in Unicode.
Nevertheless, sorting wouldn't be a problem indeed, because it is done
according to the base letter only, punctuation is irrelevant.

> Why do Greek newspapers still use ISO 8859-7?

  "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."

> nightmare), but if you're only working in Greek, why
> not stick with what you know?

  Exactly. Nothing to do with size issues, and everything to do with
that. Plus, a major operating system doesn't really support UTF-8, and
instead concentrates on UTF-16, which is unusable in UNIX/GNU systems
for most practical purposes.

> My Microsoft browser(=IE) has problems with ISO Greek
> and Windows Greek, especially capital Alpha with
> tonos: it gets confused, and displays a box.

  Well actually, this particular letter is the only incompatibility
between the two character sets. In ISO-8859-7, this letter occupies
the code point that MS Word once had hardcoded as representing the
paragraph symbol. So for Windows-1253, Microsoft put the paragraph
symbol there and moved capital Alpha with tonos elsewhere.



-- 
Vasilis Vasaitis
"A man is well or woe as he thinks himself so."



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Linux-UTF8:   i18n of Linux on all levels
Archive:      http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/

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