At 11:21 7/6/2002, John M. Fiscella wrote: >This is the first time I have seen an intelligent proposal as to the role >and application of the ZWJ and ZWNJ in non-Arabic scripts. But one problem >comes to mind, however. What if a font not having the ZWJ or ZWNJ is used >in an attempt to render the text of a document using ZWJ and ZWNJ? You may >get boxes (depending on what glyph was designed for the .notdef character).
This is an issue regardless of whether my proposal or any other is adopted to handle ZFJ sequences. There are going to be documents containing this character -- and ZWNJ -- and fonts that do not contain these characters may display them with .notdef glyphs. The only solution is system or application intelligence that is able to ensure that no attempt is made to display glyphs for these characters. This issue seems to have already been resolved in MS text processing, at least as far as I have tested it in WordPad. I have inserted a ZWJ character in a string of text using a standard PS Type 1 font, and the character is treated as a zero-width, no outline control character. There are numerous issues regarding the use of ZWJ and ZWNJ, but none that seem insurmountable. For instance, it seems essential to me that spellcheck and text search tools should be able to ignore the presence of these characters or, better yet, that it should be possible for the user to toggle recognition of these characters. John Hudson Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com Vancouver, BC [EMAIL PROTECTED] Language must belong to the Other -- to my linguistic community as a whole -- before it can belong to me, so that the self comes to its unique articulation in a medium which is always at some level indifferent to it. - Terry Eagleton
