[Lexicog] RE: Query re keyboard re-mapping

[Peter Kirk]

On 18/09/2004 22:55, John Roberts wrote:

> Forwarded by John Roberts
> From Bob Hallissy, NRSI
>
> Some comments, if you feel it helpful:
>
> On Friday, September 17, 2004 8:27 PM "Benjamin J  Barrett " wrote:
>
> >I went to the Unicode page and they have a FAQ telling people not to
> >request  modified letters.
>
> I'm not sure exactly which FAQ is being referred to here, but
> "modified letters" may be very reasonable additions to Unicode. SIL
> has, in fact, had quite a few such letters added to the standard.
>
> Now there are certain kinds of things that Unicode is not going to
> accept. For example, Unicode is not going to add any more
> /precomposed/ letters that can already be represented by a base
> character plus one or more combining marks. And they are not going to
> add any more /presentation forms/such as initial, medial, and final
> forms of Arabic characters. Unicode assumes that modern display
> engines can handle these kinds of things.
>
I suspect that Benjamin was thinking of glyph variants like
superscripts, subscripts, italic etc variants of existing characters. I
think the general rule here is that these are not accepted if their use
is simply as a presentational variant (of the kind which is best handled
by markup), but they may be accepted if there is a proven usage with a
real semantic distinction. And this semantic distinction has been proved
for superscript letters, at least for use in IPA and other phonetic
transcriptions. Superscript letters are not commonly used in regular
orthographies, but presumably there is no problem (except perhaps with
case mappings) about using these Unicode characters in cases where
superscripts are part of an orthography.


--
Peter Kirk
peter at qaya.org (personal)
peterkirk at qaya.org (work)
http://www.qaya.org/




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