On Sat, 4 Oct 2003, Shachar Shemesh wrote:AND legacy text, AND existing implementations, AND the fact that the hyphen doesn't actually appear in Unicode's Hebrew encoding, etc. etc. It is gracious enough to offer us RLM and LRM, but not, say, RLE/LRE/PDF. This forces us to use a modifier where the standard claims we should use "the right character".
If standard purity was what Unicode mandated, they should have only
defined 22 characters for Hebrew, like they did for Arabic (28). Put the
final forms in some god-forsaken place, and have the display engine
render them. They didn't do that, because real life dictates the fact
that, practically, people use 27 characters for Hebrew, and changing
that would break far too many existing applications.
Correction: Hebrew is not strict about using final forms for characters at end of words. Examples: abbreviations (roshei teivot) and words with special pronounciation (Mubarak is an example which I have on mind).
The hyphen problem is not really a problem in the Unicode standard, but of
the text editors which do not automatically convert minus sign into hyphen
when the context expects it.
The ISO-8859-8 is, I think, a badly constructed codepage. What's the point of providing a Yen, pound and cent symbols, but not NIS? I'm sorry, Windows-1255 is actually better.
Shachar
-- Shachar Shemesh Open Source integration consultant Home page & resume - http://www.shemesh.biz/
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