Tobias Schoel wrote:
That's difficult, because languages and scripture are evolving. Is there a difference between Montenegrin and Serbian? Will there be a difference for German German and Swiss German (the standardardizations of both languages are nearly identical, but there is an important typographical difference: ß) The cedilla/comma below shows the real problem: There is no fixed way of writing a letter/sign/glyph (else there wouldn't be different fonts) but the unicode model glyph=f(meaning)=F(codepoint) doesn't work that way all the times. The relation glyph <-> meaning is more difficult and depends on the people. So setting up different planes for different languages might be helpful, but its positive impact won't be so great, I think. But who knows all the problems arising from that?
Thank you for your comments, Toscho : I suppose that my underlying thesis is that Unicode is a very well-intentioned mistake. I am convinced that if the originators of Unicode were to sit around a table today, they would not come up with the same model as that with which we have presently to cope. I also fully accept your introductory remark, that languages and scripts are constantly evolving, but I think that they evolve at a sufficiently leisurely pace that it would not be unduly onerous for those responsible for maintaining the standard to ensure that it is at all times reasonably up-to-date. As to why different planes for different languages (or dialects), there are many reasons, of which (for me) the two most important are : (1) all characters required for a single language would form a contiguous cluster within the character set; and (2) any text encoded using this system would automatically carry with it implicit <language> (or <language:dialect>) tags for every stretch of text, no matter how long or how short. ** Phil. -------------------------------------------------- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex