Re: CHAT: Reformed Latin-script writing for natlangs

On Thu, 4 May 2000 10:03:23 -0400, John Cowan <jcowan@...>
wrote:

>Herman Miller wrote:
>
>> There's a whole page of the Unicode book (the second half of Latin Extended
>> Additional) that's filled with mostly characters necessary for writing
>> Vietnamese (specifically from U+1EA0 to U+1EF9). That's a lot of extra
>> characters!
>
>Note, however, that these are only necessary for backward compatibility
>with 8-bit character sets and fonts.  The True Unicode Way uses the
>combining characters in the U+0300 block with appropriate Vietnamese
>fonts that ligature things correctly (i.e. acute+circumflex is rendered
>side-by-side, not one above the other).
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. 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).

--
languages of Azir------> ----<http://www.io.com/~hmiller/languages.html>---
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