> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On > Behalf Of Dean Snyder
Dean: You've done an interesting, controlled test. I think you made things in overly difficult by using all uppercase, but I'm not really interested in critiquing the test methodology. I'm interested in whether discussing Fraktur has any relevance for the issue of encoding PH. Let's say that you have adequately demonstrated that Fraktur text is not legible to most Latin speakers. (This can be disputed since there is some measure of legibility -- all of your subjects did recognize some portions of the text. But I'll assume it's demonstrated.) All that this demonstrates is that *glyphs* may not be recognizable. It does not demonstrate that characters are distinct. For *any* script, one can create glyphs that the average user of the script will find illegible. I've seen Thai typefaces that I certainly had difficulty reading, but that does not mean that the characters are not Thai. The point is that *some* people can read such text, and they recognize those characters as Thai, or Latin in the case of Fraktur. The important question for character encoding is whether the needs of users of Fraktur are best met if they are encoded as distinct characters. For mathematicians, distinct Fraktur symbols have been encoded. But for people using Fraktur style for German (or whatever language) text, they will use the characters in the Basic Latin block. That is what will best meet their needs. (If any of them *wants* to encode text using the math symbols, that is their prerogative, but that is not necessarily what others might recommend to them for their particular application.) The fact that people who do not regularly use Fraktur find it illegible has no bearing whatsoever. The people who *do* use Fraktur (apart from the mathematicians) consider it Latin and are best served by encoding their text as Latin. For the case of PH, we can ask questions about legibility, but there is no need to look for analogues with Fraktur. Some people who know Hebrew find Hebrew-language text set with PH glyphs legible, some (the vast majority) do not. The same is true for German and Fraktur. But all that tells us is that *perhaps* PH can be unified with square Hebrew characters. It is not the only consideration in whether we do unify characters, however, and the situation wrt Fraktur does not tell us anything additional that pertains to that issue. Can we **please** discontinue this discussion of Fraktur in relation to making decisions about PH. Peter Constable
