Hi,
[As a disclaimer, I have only followed this discussion from afar, and my
reply may actually be off-topic. If this is the case, please disregard
my post ! I'm just trying to advocate the importance of "oe ligature"
here :) ]
> While I've never seen � in my limited exposure to French, I don't find
> it impossible to believe that it occurs in some limited contexts,
> perhaps for place names along the border with Spain?
As I come from the northern part of France, I may be mistaken, but I
don't think there is any case where a _French_ word or proper noun is
written with "�" ("El Ni�o" might, actually). It doesn't mean that it
doesn't happen that we use Spanish words, but then they are clearly
foreign words (if they are borrowed into the language, they would
probably loose the tilde...). But then, we would need to consider the
whole latin-1 set to be part of French.
> The only questionable thing I believe I've done is to eliminate the OE
>
> ligatures and Y with diaeresis from the French list -- those aren't in
>
> Latin 1, and I wanted to permit Latin-1 fonts to be marked as
> supporting French.
� (upper y with diaeresis) is not used that much. It only appears in a
few proper nouns, if I remember correctly - it's still part of French,
but most people don't even know it can appear. �/� (oe/OE ligature)
however appears in quite a few common words (like "�uf" (�oeuf�, egg),
"s�ur" (�soeur�, sister), "�uvre" (�oeuvre�, [artistic] work), etc.).
Although it's true that due to iso-8859-1 (and before that DOS
codepages) deficiency, some people are used to the wrong spelling, not
requiring the "�" to be included in default font selection would lead
people that don't particularly configure their font selection mechanism
to be unable to read properly written French texts. It will also hint
translators in the wrong direction, as they would not be able to use the
proper letter, since they cannot assure that, by default, fonts used to
write French contain the correct glyph.
Also, quite a few persons consider that fonts only encoding iso-8859-1
glyphs are not suitable to use for French anyway (probably not
everybody, though I guess those who don't won't really care about
properly spelled and accentuated French either).
> Note that none of this prohibits applications and users from
> explicitly selecting a font which is inappropriate for their current
> locale or document language -- explicit family names are now given
> greater weight than language matching when selecting fonts.
Does that mean that in order to read properly French (even those people
who only do that from time to time - not necessarily French speaking
people), it is _necessary_ to configure specifically your own system ?
Doesn't it kind of defeat the very purpose you're trying to accomplish ?
I hope this will help the discussion :) I didn't mean to be negative
here !
Patrice
--
Patrice H�d�
email: patrice hede � islande org
www : http://www.islande.org/
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