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Re: Unicode.org Software Internationalisation Standards &Specifications

2008-11-02 11:38:44
My last attempt to get through before PLONK.

"linuxa linux" <linuxalinux at yahoo dot co dot uk> wrote:

"Unicode makes it possible to put tens of thousands of different characters on a .....a plain-text document"

I refer to .txt files, are you also suggesting that you can put save a .txt file on the computer that has unicode 0915 glyph shape?

No plain-text file, anywhere, in any language, in any character encoding, specifies the glyph shape. That is outside the domain of plain text.

This e-mail, which is written in plain text, does not specify anything about the shapes of the letters, so even though I see it in Lucida Sans Unicode, 10 point, you might see it rendered entirely differently. You might see it in a serif font, or cursive, or in bold block capitals. If you were blind, you might not see it at all; you might hear it read to you by a screen reader.

If you want the letter between J and L to be represented with a specific glyph, you have two choices:

1. Use U+004B or U+006B, the correct CHARACTER, but specify a particular font that renders that character as if it were U+0915.

2. Use U+0915 directly, which destroys searching and sorting, but which will usually be rendered the way you want (or as a box).

The right thing to do, before carrying on this crusade against Unicode, would be to read and learn about the difference between "characters" and "glyphs." See http://unicode.org/reports/tr17/#CharactersVsGlyphs. It is much easier to criticize than learn, however, so I doubt you will do this.

--
Doug Ewell  *  Thornton, Colorado, USA  *  RFC 4645  *  UTN #14
http://www.ewellic.org
http://www1.ietf.org/html.charters/ltru-charter.html
http://www.alvestrand.no/mailman/listinfo/ietf-languages  ˆ

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