On Thursday, July 10, 2003 12:08 PM, Peter Kirk <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On 1st July Philippe Verdy wrote: > > > 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. > > > > Turkish and Azeri do not use the ij ligature. The sequences i - j and > dotless i - j do occur (rarely, as j is a rare letter in both > languages) but are treated as separate letters. I know, and the quoted paragraph did not speak about the ij ligature but effectively about the separate dotted/dotless i/I letters, for which "decorated" fonts where the lowercase ASCII (dotted) i codepoint uses a dotless glyph, or the uppercase ASCII (dotless) I codepoint uses a dotted glyph (some fonts are ligating the dot with decorative curves). These fonts are effectively not suitable for Turkish and Azeri. > In Turkish and Azeri the sequences f - i and f - dotless i both occur, > and are fairly frequent. So it is inappropriate in these languages to > use fi ligatures in which the dot on the i is lost or invisible, at > least where the second character is a dotted i. Has any thought been > given to this issue? Is it possible to block such ligation on a > language-dependent basis? Isn't there a "Grapheme Disjoiner" format control character to force the absence of a ligature like <fi>, i.e. <f, GDJ, i>? > Also it is certainly possible that in dictionaries etc in these > languages stress might be marked by an accent on the vowel - as > certainly in the older Cyrillic Azeri just as in Bulgarian as just > posted. In this case the dot should not be removed from the dotted i > when the stress mark is added, so that the distinction from dotless i > is not lost. Has that issue been addressed? (In my Latin script Azeri > dictionary stress is marked by a spacing grave accent before the > vowel, but this may have been done precisely to work around this > problem.) This is part of the proposal for review: an explicit combining dot-above diacritic can be inserted between the normal (soft-dotted) base letter and the above diacritic (with class 230): <latin-small-i, dot-above, accute-accent> <cyrillic-small-je, dot-above, grave-accent> -- Philippe.
