Re: CSUR Tonal
Kent Karlsson wrote: I see absolutely no point in reencoding the digits 0-9 even though 9 is (strangely) used to denote the value that is usually denoted 10. That is just a (very strange) usage, not different characters from the ordinary 0-9. I suggested encoding all of them because U+0030 through U+0039 have the Nd nature. That does not prevent anyone from using them for (ordinary) hexadecimal, octal, etc. So I thought about this some more, and decided that what made the difference for me was that—unlike the Basic Latin digits—the Tonal digits can *only* be used for non-decimal purposes, so none of them should be Nd. But then I thought about the properties I assigned to the Ewellic digits [1], where the first 10 (which can be either decimal or hex) are Nd and the last 6 (which can only be hex) are No. So not all members of that set have the same properties either. What makes this troublesome for me is that, on the one hand, there are the perfectly ordinary-looking 0 through 8, and on the other hand there are the invented digits for 9 and 11 through 15, and then in the middle there's this bizarre use of an ordinary 9-glyph to mean decimal 10. That's what messes it up for me and makes me think the '9' isn't really a 9, and what the heck, maybe none of the "ordinary" digits are what they appear to be, so let's CSUR-encode all of them. This is why the whole business of encoding something like Tonal, which I otherwise wouldn't care about, in CSUR is interesting to me: because it really does involve some of the same issues of properties and glyph identity and unification that "real" encoding does. I'd like some opinions on these "real" Unicode questions from some of the experts who normally stay away from PUA issues, and especially from the CSUR. -- Doug Ewell | Thornton, Colorado, USA | http://www.ewellic.org RFC 5645, 4645, UTN #14 | ietf-languages @ is dot gd slash 2kf0s [1] http://www.ewellic.org/alphabet/properties.html
Re: Draft Proposal to add Variation Sequences for Latin and Cyrillic letters
> I am thinking of where a poet might specify an ending version > of a glyph at the end of the last word on some lines, yet not > on others, for poetic effect. I think that it would be good > if one could specify that in plain text. Why can't a poet find a poetic means of doing that, instead of depending on a standards organization to provide a standard means of doing so in plain text? Seems kind of anti-poetic to me. ;-) --Ken
Re: Draft Proposal to add Variation Sequences for Latin and Cyrillic letters
On 8/5/2010 3:47 AM, William_J_G Overington wrote: On Wednesday 4 August 2010, Asmus Freytag wrote: However, there's no need to add variation sequences to select an *ambiguous* form. Those sequences should be removed from the proposal. Are you here talking about such things as alternate glyph styles? No, I am referring to the element of the proposal that proposes to have a variation sequence that selects the "unspecified" form for lower case a. It depends what one means by "need". I've written a longer answer here: http://www.unicode.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=83&start=0 A./
Re: long s
On Wed, 4 Aug 2010 Karl Pentzlin wrote: > Am Dienstag, 3. August 2010 um 19:11 schrieb Janusz S. BieÅ: > > JJSB> I see no reason why, if I understand correctly, the long s variant is > JSB> to be limited to Fraktur-like styles. > > The *variant* is applicable to situations where the character is to be > displayed long when Fraktur-like styles are in effect, while it is to > be displayed round when "modern" styles are in effect. Would you be so kind to give an example of a real-life application when it is really needed? In old Polish texts Fraktur was used for Polish and Roman/Antiqua, as the name suggests, for Latin quotation. If I want to render such a text with full (,,diplomatic'') precision, I have either to use Fraktur for Fraktur or, to make it more legible for contemporary users, to use ,,modern'' font style preseving the original long s. Preserving or not the distiction should be in my opinion a conscious decision, I see no reason to unify the variants more automatically then it is now (according at least to Polish locale, both form of s belong to the same equivalent class of POSIX regular expressions). BTW, is "round s" in the meaning used in your proposal an official or widespread term? What is its relation to the already encoded r rotunda? Regards JSB -- , dr hab. Janusz S. Bien, prof. UW - Uniwersytet Warszawski (Katedra Lingwistyki Formalnej) Prof. Janusz S. Bien - Warsaw University (Department of Formal Linguistics) jsb...@uw.edu.pl, jsb...@mimuw.edu.pl, http://fleksem.klf.uw.edu.pl/~jsbien/
Re: Draft Proposal to add Variation Sequences for Latin and Cyrillic letters
On Wednesday 4 August 2010, Asmus Freytag wrote: > However, there's no need to add variation sequences to > select an *ambiguous* form. Those sequences should be > removed from the proposal. Are you here talking about such things as alternate glyph styles? It depends what one means by "need". Adding alternate glyphs to a font is a trend in modern font design. One approach is to use Private Use Area mappings, which can be used to produce stylish hardcopy printouts and stylish graphics for the web, yet there are the well-known problems of spell-checking and so on if Private Use Area mappings are used for much more than those application areas. The other approach is to use an alternate glyph model, where the underlying plain text is conserved. However, this, today, often means using expensive software packages with a proprietary file format in order to store the information about which glyph to use in each case. I remember those advertisements that CNN used to run promoting the concept of advertising. Advertising - your right to choose. One of the advertisements distinguished between what people need and what people want. So, maybe people do not "need" to use alternate glyphs in typography, yet maybe they "want" to do so, maybe they "enjoy" doing so. I feel that it is entirely reasonable that Unicode and ISO 10646 encode things that help people do what they want to do and what they enjoy doing as well as what they need to do. William Overington 5 August 2010
Re: Draft Proposal to add Variation Sequences for Latin and Cyrillic letters
Thank you for your reply. On Wednesday 4 August 2010, Karl Pentzlin wrote: > WO> Why is it not possible specifically to request a one-storey form of > lowercase letter a? > > I did not this, as I do not know a cultural context where the two-storey form > is to be suppressed to prevent an "a" to be mistaken for any letter too > similar to a two-storey a. Well, I was intending this as a straightforward way to access glyph alternates. Noticing that you mentioned cultural context, I have now remembered a situation that might perhaps be of interest. It was in a thread about fonts for teaching children in the United Kingdom how to read and write. http://forum.high-logic.com/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=296 > WO> What happens in relation to a character such as g circumflex? Would one > be able to access a glyph alternate for g circumflex? > > The variant selector can be followed by any diacritic which then is applied > to the base character. Yet what if one wants to use the precomposed g circumflex character? > WO> Could there be variants for lowercase e, ... > > I have found none, which of course is no proof of > non-existence, > > WO> for a horizontal line glyph design, and for an > angled line, > > Not according to the principles outlined in my proposal, > > WO>Â Venetian-style font, glyph design please? > > No. I was looking for a way to access a glyph alternate for typography, not for any cultural meaning. Maybe one might choose to use an e with an angled line in the words Venice and Venetian, for subtle effect in the typography. I find that adding alternate glyphs to fonts is a modern trend. There seems no current way to access them from plain text. > WO> Would it be possible to define U+FE15 VARIATION SELECTOR-16 to indicate > an end of word alternate glyph for each lowercase Latin character? > > No. Even if you find a cultural context where such things are required, such > things are positional variants which are to be handled by the proven > mechanisms developed for scripts like Arabic. I am thinking of where a poet might specify an ending version of a glyph at the end of the last word on some lines, yet not on others, for poetic effect. I think that it would be good if one could specify that in plain text. William Overington 5 August 2010
