Ernest indicated: > Whether using variation sequences to separate > Phoenician from Square Hebrew would be daft > would depend upon a number of factors. > > How often would both glyph repertoires appear in > the same document? > > How frequently would non-Square Hebrew glyphs > be used? > > How important is it to any particular body of users > to emphasize the relationship of the different > repertoires by using the same base characters? > > How large would that body of users be compared > to other users who do not need such an emphasis? > > I don't know the answers to the above questions.
Actually, I think the answers to those questions are irrelevant. > I see those answers as determining whether > non-unification or unification supplemented with > variation sequences would be the better choice. The main reason why such a proposal is daft is because the UTC has never had any intention that variation sequences be used this way -- and as a result would never acquiesce in encoding an entire *script* as a set of variation sequences off another script. The options are, as John indicated: a. Assume one script, and render differences via fonts (mapped to the same code points). b. Assume two scripts, encode distinctly, and render differences via fonts (mapped to different code points). Variation sequences are used to indicate variant glyphs for particular characters within a script (or set of symbols) -- not as a hack for avoiding the encoding of a script entire or for avoiding the need for font tagging to make visual distinctions in a writing system. Variation sequences are also a last resort, used only in instances where a distinct character encoding approach smells too much of duplication of otherwise identical "characters" which just happen to have some particular formal distinction that is needed for rendering, roundtrip mapping, etc. Of course you can (and have) argued that you can simply apply that logic to *every* character of a script. But I can assure you that there is *no* constiuency for approaching decisions about encoding an entire script that way in either the UTC or in WG2. --Ken
