> From: Peter Kirk [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Sent: Wednesday, May 26, 2004 2:44 PM
> Well, what are these technical issues? The only technical issue > concerning which there have been "repeated requests", at least since the > early stages of this thread which I may have forgotten, has been the > issue of legibility. Legibility has been one technical issue: for (at least some) non-Semitic paleographers, text that displayed as square Hebrew characters would fail to convey the intended semantics. Text-corpus queries are another concern for the same users: they do *not* want PH characters folded with Hebrew characters. I realize that the Semiticists would like the two folded, but it is not difficult to neutralize a distinction in data, whereas it is *very* difficult to infer distinctions that do not exist in the data. These are at least two technical issues for non-Semiticist paleographers that are a significant problem with a unified encoding. In contrast, any problems faced by Semiticist paleographers can be handled without difficulty if two distinct scripts are encoded. I have asked more than once for the pro-unification camp to acknowledge and respond to these concerns, and am still waiting to hear even an acknowledgement. A further consideration is how the needs of users other than paleographers can best be served. Peter Peter Constable Globalization Infrastructure and Font Technologies Microsoft Windows Division
