I'll weigh in to agree with Ken here. The solution of cloning a whole set of these things just to fix combining behavior is, to understate, not quite nice.
No, but would be far from the not nicest thing in Unicode, and there's a really good reason for it. I was originally intrigued by Ken's ZWJ idea -- or by a variant of it using some new re-ordering inhibiting character, to avoid overloading ZWJ any further --, but the more I think about it, the more not nice I think it is to force Biblical scholars to carry the can for errors in the Unicode combining classes.
Control characters, usually ZWJ and ZWNJ, seem to get proposed as solutions to all sorts of text processing complexities. Some of these are perfectly legitimate and reflect the need of users to be able to to control the display of text in different ways, e.g. by forcing half-forms in Indic scripts. But I don't think control characters should be used as fixes for mistakes, especially not when the distinction is not between two different but equally valid ways of displaying the same text, e.g. as a conjunct ligature or with half-forms, but between displaying text correctly or incorrectly. How many English users would accept a text processing model in which the distinction between 'goal' and 'gaol' relied on insertion of a control character between the vowels? I believe the aim in fixing this problem in Unicode should be to provide Biblical scholars with a good text processing experience, not with awkward kludges, even if that means making the Unicode Hebrew block look weird with duplicated marks. The standard should serve the users, not the aesthetic and organisational sensitivities of the people who design the standard.
John Hudson
Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com Vancouver, BC [EMAIL PROTECTED]
If you browse in the shelves that, in American bookstores,
are labeled New Age, you can find there even Saint Augustine,
who, as far as I know, was not a fascist. But combining Saint
Augustine and Stonehenge -- that is a symptom of Ur-Fascism.
- Umberto Eco
