Την Mon, 06 Feb 2006 21:58:13 +0100,ο(η) Jan Willem Stumpel
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> έγραψε/wrote:
Imitating the difficult-to-learn Windows system for 'multiple
diacriticals' should IMHO be offered as an option, but not as the only
option. The ease with which diacriticals can be combined by means of
xkb/Compose could be a 'Linux selling point' in the academic world.
BTW I am now terribly confused about he tonos/oxia issue.
-- "Tonos and oxia are considered equivalent in Unicode" - but why,
then, are there different code points for them (U+1FFD, and all
the letters "with oxia", vs. U+0384 and all the letters "with
tonos")? Where does it actually say that they are equivalent?
In ancient greek and modern "katharevousa" (a formal archaic greek)
there were three accents. (I don't know the english names)
Perispomeni (~), oxia (acute) and grave (`), which were all together named
with the word 'tonos' (accents)
Yet, in modern greek practically noone was actually distinguishing between
acute and grave, so the accents used was oxia and perispomeni.
The next step was to deprecate all these accent marks and use only one
simpe accent, for the words that have multiple syllabes.
This was called 'monotonic greek'.
That simple accent was simply called "tonos" (accent) and actually
was the acute. Still typographically there was no prefference about
the slope of tonos (/ \ or |) and modern "monotonic" greek fonts
may use a | glyph, or a dot above
This glyph may be good for monotonic greek, but it is completely
unsuitable for ancient or polytonic greek, so in the meantime
font designers were making different glyphs and were using
different character codes for each case.
This is a very stupid distinction, because there is no such
difference between tonos and oxia (acute), and no such symbol as
a "vertical line above" or a "dot above" in greek;
The issue was finally resolved by greek government, which declared
that tonos is actually the acute (oxia).
But this has become TOO LATE, because EL.O.T. (the Hellenic Standarization
Organization) had allready proposed different characters to the
unicode consortium.
After that, many people who were using polytonic greek (out of Greece)
had allready converted their texts from the original 8bit encodings
to unicode using the new characters with 'oxia'
This faq describes the story.
http://www.unicode.org/faq/greek.html
and for more info http://ptolemy.tlg.uci.edu/~opoudjis/unicode/unicode.html
The difference between 'oxia' and 'tonos' and the problems related
to that is mentionned in more detail here:
http://ptolemy.tlg.uci.edu/~opoudjis/unicode/unicode_gkbkgd.html#oxia
-- Many (maybe most) font creators made different glyphs for oxia
and tonos (although others did not, see the Gentium font), because
they were "looking at unicode". But, surely, that was the correct
place to look?
Well there is no other way for modern greek. Neither can be a distinction
between tonos and oxia, nor we may have two different keycodes for
the same character. Imagine what will happen if a Greek user uses
polytonic keyboard to enter a filename.
It's just a matter of fonts. If someone wants to write monotonic greek is
free to use any font he/she likes. But for polytonic greek he/she has
to use a polytonic font (which must define correctly the polytonic glyphs)
Font designers claim the opposite; that the user should keep oxia and
tonos combinations distinct, but this is incorrect according unicode
and, as I said, is extremely dangerous when mixed with modern greek.
Then again, the actual reason is that unicode cannocinal equivalence is not
correctly implemented neither by applications nor by fonts.
According to unicode, a proccess must not treat equivalent characters
differently, nor assume that some other proccess does.
Even more, a text may be automatically normalized at any time (without
the user or any other program knowing that) by the system or a intermediate
proccess, having some characters decomposed or replaced by their
canonical equivalents.
-- Kostas calls it "a bug of the fonts". If there is a bug, isn't it
in the Unicode standard ?
As Simos said, this is rather a way of thinking than a bug. Unicode has
not altered existing encodings. It has included them all and defined the
relationships and the equivalences for future use.
The problem is that most applications do not yet implement these rules.
And since people are still treating equivalent characters as not equal,
some font designers decide to do so too.
When it comes to Greek there is another reason. Usually a font implements
the basic symbols first (with tonos) in the monotonic way, so later
they just add polytonic accents.
I hope there is a way to put the genie back into the bottle. Just making
the keyboard entry for oxia "hard, forcing people not to use it" does
not seem to be the right way.
The correct way is the maturity of unicode:
When all the texts are beeing normalized, all programs will become aware
of character equivalence, and smart fonts will be used to decide which
glyph suits best for every case.
In the meantime, some font designers use this workaround to improve
the displaying of their fonts, thus making the problem persistant
I hope it helped,
Kostas
--
Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels
Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
