Re: CHAT: Reformed Latin-script writing for natlangs

Herman Miller scripsit:

> Unfortunately, TrueType under Windows doesn't have that capability, so
> going to 16-bit character sets doesn't help. Yet another short-sighted
> implementation on Microsoft's part.
Try this.  Download the CODE2000 Unicode font
from http://http://home.att.net/~jameskass/CODE2000.ZIP and install it.
Make it your Unicode font in Netscape.  Then visit
http://www.unicode.org/unicode/reports/tr15/NormalizerChart.html ,
which displays composed and decomposed characters side-by-side in
columns 2 and 3.  On my Windows NT 4.0 system, they are identical in
form, showing that the decomposed sequence is converted by the font
engine to the correct glyph.

> But the point was that Vietnamese
> requires a lot of extra characters (whether they're specifically assigned
> codes in the character set or defined as ligatures doesn't matter; they all
> have to be accounted for at some point in the system).
Using decomposed characters, the *characters* required are just A-Z
and the eight diacritical marks (circumflex, breve, horn, acute, tilde,
grave, hook, dot below).  That simplifies the whole rest of the system
except for a trivial complication in the font engine, essentially
no different from processing ligatures.

--
John Cowan                                   cowan@ccil.org
       I am a member of a civilization. --David Brin