> >A question about the issues already open: What is the justification for > >proposing to make Braille Lo?
Shortly before this came up as a "Public Review Issue", I suggested that Braille characters should not be regarded as ignorable symbols when collating texts. I.e. that they should have "level one" weights in the default weighting table. The reason being that they are more often used for letters than for other things. (However, I did not ask to make them "Lo"...) That would be for the default ordering. Wanting a more "alphabetically proper" ordering, would still require tailoring for that particular correspondence between "ordinary" letters and Braille, but not require converting to the "ordinary" letters. Each such tailoring would give level 1 weights to most of the Braille characters used in that system of usage. > Among other things it would make it part of identifiers. > However, there's > been some suggestion that this is a bad idea. Whether or not > a braille > symbol actually stands for a letter or a digit or a > punctuation mark is > entirely dependent on a higher level protocol. I would agree with your reasoning here. I don't think Braille should be used for identifiers. > Also, by making them Lo, any parser that tries to collect > words, would run > them together with any surrounding regular letters and > digits. That seems > odd, but perhaps its not any more odd than mixing Devanagari and Han. I.e., this is not so odd at all (a quite different case from identifiers). > The original model for these was that your text processing is done in > non-Braille, and on the last leg to a device, you would transcode the > regular text to a Braille sequence using a domain and > language specific > mapping. Having the codes in Unicode allows you to preserve > 'final form' > and transmit that as needed w/o having to also transmit the > text-to-braille > mapping(s) that were used to generate the Braille version of > the text. > (This assumes that the eventual human reader can do 'autodetection'.) This does not apply to text that have been manually written in or translated to Braille (for a particular language). As I have understood it, writers/transcribers often use(d) peculiar writings, e.g. abbreviations, that would not occur in "normal" text, the "abbreviations" varied from "scribe" to "scribe". I'm not familiar with the details though. Braille can be used also for math and music notation. B.t.w. Braille often uses "state shifts", e.g. for digits. There is a "digits" Braille code, followed by one or more codes for the letters a-j (if the basic script is Latin) which then stand for 1, ..., 9, 0 (the list is terminated with any non-a-j code; but decoding the Braille for e.g. 12a is ambiguous, IIUC). /kent k
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