Re: Devanagari and Subscript and Superscript

[Richard Wordingham]

On Wed, 9 Dec 2015 03:24:39 +
Plug Gulp  wrote:

> I am trying to understand if there is a way to use Devanagari
> characters (and grapheme clusters) as subscript and/or superscript in
> unicode text.

Why do you want to do this?  Are you asking about writing Devanagari
vertically rather than horizontally?  If that is what you want, you
should be looking at mark-up such as is found in cascading style sheets
(CSS).  It is an important issue for CJK and Mongolian, and there have
been questions as to what is needed for Indian scripts.  (There's also
an antiquarian interest for historical scripts, such as Phags-pa and
even Egyptian - moves are afoot to support the hieroglyphic script as
plain text.)

Richard.

Re: Proposal for German capital letter "ß"

[Marcel Schneider]

On Thu, 10 Dec 2015 10:56:50 -0800, Leo Broukhis  wrote:

> This prompts a question: for case conversion bijectivity in fr_FR
> locale, should there be "invisible accents"? E.g.
> déjà -> DE(combining invisible acute accent)JA(combining invisible
> grave accent) -> déjà
> whereas in fr_CA locale, it is simply
> déjà -> DÉJÀ -> déjà

In fr_FR locale, it is, too. Thank you for your courtesy, invisible diacritics 
are indeed a very good idea if undiacriticized uppercase were really an actual 
need. But since your proposal is about case *conversion*, it's meant for *new* 
text, as opposed to historical editing. Introducing a mechanism to get accents 
off the caps without altering lowercase, is twice useless. First because 
undiacriticized uppercase is far from being an ideal, it's a mere second best 
that grew usual for a time but should have no more place. Second because it 
mainly would become useful in case conversion of *existing* all-caps that 
obviously has been written without the new invisible accents.

Eric's finding 
[http://www.unicode.org/mail-arch/unicode-ml/y2015-m12/0041.html] that 'E' was 
always diacriticized but 'A' wasn't always, illustrates partly the pragmatic 
second-best solution of avoiding the accent on top when it often breaks away on 
lead typography letters, and partly the dislike of such on-tip accents which 
some people considered as "ugly". But in turn this dislike could have been the 
product of simply seldom seeing the accent on the tip of the 'A'. Fortunately 
all these byways are now past and useless.

Subsequently, I feel the need to stronly underscore Ralf Herrmann's conclusion 
on 23 Jan 2011 in the blog post that Asmus linked to 
[http://www.unicode.org/mail-arch/unicode-ml/y2015-m12/0036.html]:



The capital Eszett is now used more every day. It is included in several 
Windows 7 fonts and more and more type designers are designing a capital Eszett 
for newly released typefaces. I would like to finish with a quote about the 
capital Eszett from 1879, which I consider as true today as it was then:

 

“Indeed—it is a new character; but maybe this newness is the only thing you can 
hold against it.”

 

(Original quote: „Allerdings – es ist ein neues Zeichen; vielleicht ist aber 
die Neuheit das Einzige, was sich dagegen vorbringen lässt.“)

 


[/quote]

IMHO the full achievement of Unicode is to be able to not only reproduce 
inherited practice, but above all, to enhance the actual one.

Best regards,

Marcel