On 03/10/16 18:59, Steve Swales wrote:
On Oct 3, 2016, at 10:14 AM, Doug Ewell <d...@ewellic.org> wrote:
a.lukyanov wrote:
I think that the right thing to do would be to create several new
control/formatting characters, like this:
"previous character is superscript"
"previous character is subscript"
"previous character is small caps (for use in phonetic transcription
only)"
"previous character is mathematical blackletter"
etc
Then people will be able to apply this features on any character as
long as their font supports it.
I happen to think this would be exactly the wrong thing to do,
completely contrary to the principles of plain text that Unicode was
founded upon. But you never know what might gain traction, so stay
tuned.
I guess I don’t see how it is fundamentally different from other variant
selector uses within Unicode, and the ability to write properly formatted
mathematical and chemical formulas (for example) in a plain text environment
like text messaging seems like a fairly compelling use case.
-steve
Yes, but since there are existing well-standardized higher-level
protocols already in existence (HTML, MATHML, TeX, etc. etc.) that do
exactly that. They should be used instead, as opposed to trying to make
Unicode something other than a plain-text character encoding, contrary
to its design principles. Moreover, while you describe seems
superficially simple, as soon as you try to expand it, you will find you
end up with systems like this:
http://unicode.org/notes/tn28/UTN28-PlainTextMath.pdf which are neither
one nor the other, and in spite of their proposal as a plain-text
notation, actually ends up being an ad-hoc higher-level protocol anyway.
Neil
