On Tuesday, September 28th, 2004 03:22 "Tom" wrote:
Let's say. The test engineer ensures the functionality and validates the input and output on major Latin 1 languages, such as German, French, Spanish, Italian,
Just a side point: French cannot be fully addressed with Latin 1.
True, due to the missing (but rare) oe or OE ligature (which is present in the newer Latin 9, as well as in the Windows ANSI codepage 1252 for western European languages). Anyway, no French users actually complain of this omission: either they use ISO-8859-1 and the ligatures will simply be replaced by separate vowels (which is still correct for French collation, even though the strict French orthograph requires using a ligature when *rendering*; in addition, French keyboards typically never include a key to enter these ligatures, which are only entered with "assisted" word processors with on-the-fly autocorrection), or they will use the Windows 1252 codepage without seeing that these characters were added to Latin 1 by Microsoft in its Windows codepage. A few common sample words that use these ligatures are "oeil" (english: eye), "oeuf" (english: "egg") and "boeuf" (english: "beef), and "coeur" (english: heart). (Note that this message does not use the mandatory ligature). There are some other words, but they are really uncommon in French conversations (most of them are in the medical and botanic vocabulary). This ligature cannot be automated so simply in renderers, because there are exceptions: see "coexister" where the two vowels are clearly voiced separately and must never be ligated. But one way to determine if "oe" must be ligated in French is when it is followed by another vowel (normally an 'i' or 'u'), and if the "e" has no accent. The "ae" ligature is used in French, but not in the common language (I think it is used only in some technical juridic or religious terms, inherited from Latin, or in some medical and botanic jargon): I can't even remember of one French word that uses it; that's why there were some fonts designed for French where the "oe" and "OE" ligatures replaced the "ae" and "AE" ligatures. (Note that I say "ligature" and not "vowel", because it is their actual usage in French, that also matches its collation rules).
With those considerations, would a software that only supports the ISO-8859-1 character set be considered "not ready" for French usage? I think not, and even today most French texts are coded with this limited subset, without worrying about the absence of a rare ligature, whose absence is easily infered by readers.
