On 2010-06-08 22:27, Nick Sabalausky wrote: <snip>
1. Am I correct in all of that?
Yes. In particular, the three-byteness of CJK characters is an often-cited reason to use UTF-16 instead of UTF-8.
2. Is there a proper way to encode that modifier character by itself? For instance, if you wanted to write "Japanese has a (the modifier by itself here) that changes a sound".
You can combine it with a space, but yes: that mark, called the dakuten or voicing mark, can be encoded by itself as U+309B.
I recommend http://rishida.net/scripts/uniview/ for searching through Unicode.
3. A text editor, for instance, is intended to treat something like (U+305D, U+3099) as a single character, right?
Yes, I'd say so. I suppose it could allow for removing only the modifier (or the modified), but that doesn't seem like it should be the default behaviour.
4. When comparing strings, are (U+305E) and (U+305D, U+3099) intended to compare as equal?
Yes. You might want to read about equivalence and normalization in Unicode: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_equivalence
5. Does Phobos/Tango correctly abide by whatever the answer to #4 is?
AFAIK, neither support normalization of any kind.
6. Are there other languages with similar things for which the answers to #3 and #4 are different? (And if so, how does Phobos/Tango handle it?)
Factor has pretty good support for Unicode: http://docs.factorcode.org/content/article-unicode.html
7. I assume Unicode doesn't have any provisions for Furigana, right? I assume that would be outside the scope of Unicode, but I thought I'd ask.
There's: U+FFF9 INTERLINEAR ANNOTATION ANCHOR U+FFFA INTERLINEAR ANNOTATION SEPARATOR U+FFFB INTERLINEAR ANNOTATION TERMINATOR But it's usually recommended to use some kind of ruby markup instead. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_character#Ruby_in_Unicode -- E-mail address: matti.niemenmaa+news, domain is iki (DOT) fi
