Philippe Verdy <verdy underscore p at wanadoo dot fr> wrote:
If I want to encode explicit ligatures for the "ffi" cluster, if it is not hyphenated, I need to add ZWJ: "ef"+ZWJ+SHY+"f"+ZWJ+"i"+SHY+"ca"+SHY+"ce" (1)
Great Scott! You can use ZWJ to suggest a ligation opportunity, and SHY to suggest a hyphenation opportunity, but if you need to suggest both within the same word, let alone *between the same pair of letters*, you have probably stepped over the plain-text line.
If encoding ligation oportunity is not plain-text, why then have it in Unicode?
If hyphenation opportunity is not plain-text, why then have it in Unicode?
Both exist in Unicode, and I don't think that they are considered not plain-text. So why would you want to restrict their usage so that they will be used only separately?
The ZWJ and SHY format controls for these two targets are added on purpose when preparing documents for later rendering. They shouldn't affect the collation of text and will not change their semantic, and this transformation of text cannot be fully automated without using complex lexical and linguistic knowledge. That's why they should be allowed in texts kept for archiving.
If you want to use later those prepared texts on more simpler renderers and parsers, you can still ignore and filter out the ZWJ and SHY very easily, so this preparation work, performed most often by typists, is normally reversible.
Nobody is required to use them, but if one wants to do it for better rendering of prepared documents, why would Unicode forbid it? Was my question really so stupid?
