Whatever you do, any new characters designed for solving these problems should not be in the Hebrew block. Add a new Biblical Hebrew block, clearly labeled as not intended for regular Hebrew use.
And I suggest that whenever a proposal comes up to the UTC, it would be advantageous to involve Israeli Biblical scientists in the review. Jony > -----Original Message----- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of John Hudson > Sent: Friday, June 27, 2003 2:29 AM > To: Rick McGowan > Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Subject: SPAM: Re: Biblical Hebrew > > > At 03:52 PM 6/26/2003, Rick McGowan wrote: > > >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 > > >
