On Tuesday, July 01, 2003 1:55 PM, Kent Karlsson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > My feeling about the proposed "Public Review" document should > > exclude the <ij> ligature, waiting for the decision about the new > > <dotless-ij> ligature approved in the first rounds by UTC and > > waiting for approval by ISO JTC... > > There is no proposal to add any dotless ij ligature character. Please > read the pipeline documents more carefully before going off imagining > a character not being proposed, and is unlikely to be seriously > proposed. Sorry, I should have written <dotless-j> in the last paragraph, for the proposed character at U+0237 (LATIN SMALL LETTER DOTLESS J) For me the <ij> ligature is mostly used for Dutch, and the few applications where <ij,accute> and <ij,macron> are used should be rendering them according to that language, where it is handled as a single letter. In all other cases, the <ij> ligature should be avoided, simply because there are other better choices with <i>/<dotless-i>/<I>/<dotted-I> and <j>/<J>/<proposed-dotless-j>, in combination with double diacritics inserted between them to produce the desired effect. In either cases, the "Soft_Dotted" property is probably overkill on the existing <ij> or <IJ> ligatures (should should have been better named "letters" and not "ligatures") for Dutch. Or is this update needed to document officially the expected rendering behavior for sequences <ij,accute> and <ij,macron>? The main interest of the Soft_Dotted property is not to describe the rendering for the character, but to document how case conversions (lowercase, uppercase, titlecase, folded) can be performed safely on the Unicode encoded string. I'd like to know exactly why it is needed for Dutch, as such a ligature is not used in Turkish and Azeri written with the Altaic Latin alphabet... If fonts still want to display dots on these characters, that's a rendering problem: there already exists a lot of fonts used for languages other than Turkish and Azeri, which do not display any dot on a lowercase ASCII i or j (dotted), and display a dot on their uppercase ASCII versions (normally not dotted with classic fonts)... The absence or presence of these dots is then seen as "decorative" even if these fonts are not suitable for Turkish and Azeri, but this is clearly not an encoding problem in the Unicode encoded text, and not a problem either for case conversions. The only reason that would justify adding a "Soft_Dotted" property on <ij> would be that it is needed to allow the correct handling of language-dependant case conversions. -- Philippe.
