[Feed another to the shubnet . . .] I have a copy of Shellbear's Practical Malay Grammar that I'm preparing to transcribe for Project Gutenberg. Unfortunately, he represents the Malaysian alphabet in a Latin transliteration that includes ng as a single ligatured form, and I don't know how to transcribe in Unicode. Some ideas: (1) Use a private use character. Not feasible, because it needs to readable by the average person, not just someone who has patience to set up their computer for this one file. (2) Use a ZWJ between n and g. If I'm not mistaken, most current systems will show the ZWJ as a little black box, and there's going to be very few systems any time soon that would actually display the ng ligature. Still, a good Unicode system will elide the ZWJ displaying the acceptable ng with the real information still in the file. (3) Petition Unicode for a new character. Right. I'm going to argue for a character used in two books (that I know of) that bears annoying similarity to the ng (non-ligatured) flame wars, that in the best of cases I wait a couple years for it to be accepted. (4) Resort to ASCII trickery to distinguish between ng (ligatured) and ng (non-ligatured). Marking the ng (ligatured) would be ugly; marking the unligatured would be also ugly, although a lot rarer - I don't know if Malay (in this transliteration) uses ng (non-ligatured). (5) Just use ng. A simple, just ASCII solution. I don't know if it's information preserving though. Any suggestions? -- David Starner - [EMAIL PROTECTED] Gutenberg stuff - http://dvdeug.dhis.org/guten/ (down for the week) Free, encrypted, secure Web-based email at www.hushmail.com
