On Wed, Nov 17, 2004 at 11:40:43AM +0100, Danilo Segan wrote: > No, Emacs (Gnus) doesn't have a "combining" features, so it just > lists the characters one after another. Pango (I use Gnome for > everything else) should do it at least a bit better, but the results > will probably not be the same.
Hi, Slightly based on it, I have some questions with the combining characters. It's clear to me how they should be handled if the complete text to be displayed in known in advance. But I don't know what has to be done if one tries to display a real-time text flow. Just think of a talk/ytalk enhancement working with UTF-8 encoding and NFD representation. And network lags... Maybe I type an "á", first "a" is sent over the network, then for some reason some packets are lost or there's a short network failure, and the combining acute is only sent five seconds later. The receiver party has to first display an "a" since it doesn't know it's going to be continued. Then later it has to be able to put an accent over the already displayed character. What's the design rationale of the combining character following instead of preceding the letter itself? Just think of TeX's \'a, or the combining character feature of linux console and X window, here always the accent is entered first, which makes it much easier to handle these input streams. What is backspace supposed to do with NFD unicode streams? Should it delete one unicode entity (that is only the accent from the top of a letter) or a complete combined character? thx, Egmont -- Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
