On 11/08/2004 15:27, Doug Ewell wrote:
... Peter's two combining marks, a black
one in the actual manuscript and a red one added by the editor, sounds
less like a problem that Unicode or W3C need to worry about.
I agree that it is not a problem for Unicode. But I do think it is a potential problem for W3C if the latter aims to represent how people actually display text.
As another example, there was a discussion on the Unicode Hebrew list not long ago of two combining marks, used in certain texts for variant forms of Dagesh and Sheva, which are distinguished from the regular forms by being larger and/or more bold, although used with the regular base characters. It was judged that they should not be encoded as separate characters, partly because the use is rather idiosyncratic but also because it was said that these variants should be distinguished from the regular forms by markup, e.g. by marking as bold or as a larger size. I strongly suspect that similar arguments have been used e.g. against variant sizes of accents, shapes of umlaut etc. But this markup argument fails if the standard forms of markup are unable to make such distinctions in combining marks when there is no distinction in the base character. This could open the door for a lot more proposals to encode in Unicode variant forms of combining marks.
-- Peter Kirk [EMAIL PROTECTED] (personal) [EMAIL PROTECTED] (work) http://www.qaya.org/
