RE: Character identities

[Alain LaBonté]

A 21:46 2002-10-29 +0000, Michael Everson a écrit :

At 13:27 -0800 2002-10-29, Kenneth Whistler wrote:

Michael asked:

 My eyes have glazed over reading this discussion. What am I being
 asked to agree with?

Here's the executive summary for those without the time to
plow through the longer exchange:

Marco: It is o.k. (in a German-specific context) to display
       an umlaut as a macron (or a tilde, or a little e above),
       since that is what Germans do.

Kent:  It is *not* o.k. -- that constitutes changing a character.

[Michael]  Kent can't be right here.

[Alain] However I agree with Kent. Let's say a text identified as German quotes a French word with an U DIAERESIS *in the German text* (a word like "capharnaüm"). It would be a heresy to show a macron in a printed text in this context. In French *nobody* uses this practice that is frequent in German handwriting (but not in printing, unless I am wrong).

One has to respect characters for what they are. A U DIAERESIS is not a U MACRON even if its codepoint is shared with a German U UMLAUT that may be handwritten with a *vague* resemblance to a U MACRON.

Alain LaBonté
Québec