But, Jony, this IS a difference in the text. It is a different character sequence with a very different pronunciation and a thousand year history of a different graphical representation. Joan has shown that it is NOT just a difference made in one recent text as some had suggested. It was just convenient to lose the graphical distinction when computers were not powerful or well enough specified to make it.The most reasonable way to achieve visible effects, as opposed to difference in text, is by markup.
Jony
This reminds me of the polytonic Greek issue. If I understand correctly, the Greek government decided to do away with the distinction between accents because this was easier to implement with 1960's computers. But modern use in Greece is not the entire range of the Greek language, and so Unicode was forced to backtrack and add a whole extra block for polytonic Greek. As with Greek, so with Hebrew, Unicode has to support thousands of years of language history and not just usage since the 1960's deliberately simplified for the computer age. The difference is that the Greek accents were not pronounced differently, at least in modern Greek, but the Hebrew letters are pronounced very differently. Also we are talking about adding at most one letter, or none at all, certainly not a whole block.
If we are to use markup to distinguish between characters which are semantically and phonetically as well as graphically distinct, we may as well reduce Unicode to one character and make all distinctions with markup. ;-)
-- Peter Kirk [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://web.onetel.net.uk/~peterkirk/
