On Wednesday, July 30, 2003 11:57 AM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > I agree 100% with your description of the characters that have not been > encoded in Unicode. There are certainly marks and consonants that mean two > completely different things, as you have so accurately described. But there > are two approaches to encoding. There is "Code what you see" and "Code what > is meant". In your analysis and in the way SIL encoded the original SIL > Ezra font, we went with "Code what is meant". This means that we have two > shevas (one pronounced and one silent), a holemwaw character and a shureq > character. Unicode, on the other hand, is totally "Code what you see". It > is attempting to make no analysis of the marks on the page. If there is a > mark, code it. If it is identical to another mark, then it gets the same > codepoint. (Of course, there are exceptions, but this is the general rule.)
One of the key points some of us are trying to make is that vav with kholam khaser is a different mark on the page than a kholam male. Different semantics AND different appearance, but no separate Unicode encoding. What more do we need? Besides, what's all this that I keep reading about Unicode encodes characters, not glyphs? From Chapter 1: "[T]he standard defines how characters are interpreted, not how glyphs are rendered." The "code what you see" approach, while probably the reality of Unicode, seems somewhat contrary to this statement of principle. > So with Unicode, there is no way to separate even vowels and consonants, > since a waw in a shureq, a holem-waw, and just a plain waw will always be > encoded the same. Some of us are trying to make this approach usable by > allowing at least a holem-waw to be distinguished from waw holem, by > placing the holem first. > > For the encoders, it is fairly straight-forward. For the people trying to > actually use the encoding, it's going to take a lot of context to determine > what you've got. Yes, indeed. Nothing like an encoding that can't be decoded. :) Ted Ted Hopp, Ph.D. ZigZag, Inc. [EMAIL PROTECTED] +1-301-990-7453 newSLATE is your personal learning workspace ...on the web at http://www.newSLATE.com/
