Re: Yerushala(y)im - or Biblical Hebrew

[John Hudson]

Thinking about this whole Hebrew encoding/normalisation problem from the 
rendering side -- i.e. in terms of smart font glyph substitution and mark 
positioning -- it seems me that *if* a character is to be inserted between 
two vowels that visually follow a single consonant, it would be preferable 
if this were not a control character. If the character is something that is 
actually painted as a glyph, it is incredibly easy to resolve the rendering 
problems in the font's composition/decomposition <ccmp> feature by, for 
example, ignoring marks while 'ligating' the consonant + extra character to 
the consonant glyph alone. This would happen before the mark positioning 
takes place, so would ensure that the presence of the extra character does 
not break mark positioning in the way that actual control characters seem 
to (and which cannot be be included in <ccmp> lookups because they are not 
painted).

Of course, if this problem is thought about from the text search, sort, 
etc. perspective, the presence of a non-control character -- even an 
invisible one -- introduces problems, since it changes the encoding of the 
word. As noted previously, users are unlikely to know that they must insert 
an invisible character into search strings. My question is whether this is 
something that can be addressed in search engines and other places 
affected, so that this character could be filtered out during operations? 
Or, failing that, if we might here have a use for a new zero-width 
character that will be ignored during search and sort operations --- as 
control characters like ZWNJ and CGJ are -- but which will be painted -- as 
control characters typically are not?

John Hudson

Tiro Typeworks          www.tiro.com
Vancouver, BC           [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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