> On 4 Nov 2003 at 16:03, John Cowan wrote:
>
> > Christophe Grandsire scripsit:
> >
> > > Yep. Luckily, Unicode includes the IJ as a single character :) .
> >
> > But only for backward compatibility with a few oddball character sets.
> > Using the ij-ligature in Unicode is exactly (canonically) equivalent to
> > using i followed by j.
Does that mean that any unicode software should use them in the same way?
When I google for a Dutch word with a lange ij, the results are not the same
for e.g. "IJsland" (47500 pages) and "IJsland" (only 17 pages).
>
> That sounds odd, although I know almost nothing of the technical
> details and terminology of Unicode. Does this same notion of
> equivalence extend to other multi-symbol characters with single-
> symbol representations? For example, is U+0061,U+0301 (a,combining-
> acute) considered canonically equivalent to U+00E1 (a-acute)?
>
> I note in my Unicode character pad (Bjondi Character Agent
>
http://www.bjondi.com) that U+00E1 is listed as having a
> decomposition of U+0061,U+0301, whereas U+0133 (ij-ligature) is not
> listed as having a decomposition of U+0069,U+0070 (i,j). Does this
> have any relevance to my question?