On 08/10/2002 05:42:04 PM Tex Texin wrote:
>2) Superscript, subscript, combining above, and other forms of >identifying placement of characters, are better left to markup or other >rendering systems and file formats (and not for a vehicle intended for >plain text.) I will partially disagree with Tex. It's true as a general rule that such things should be handled by markup or rich text, for general documents, but I think there are special application areas in which I think it is correct to encode superscripted, subscripted or combining letters. One example is phonetic transcription, in which phonetic symbols can be superscripted with particular semantics. Digitising of manuscripts for paleographic research can be another appropriate application for this. But, I completely agree with his comments about the PUA. If there is a need for >a facility to >document transcribers all around the world then PUA makes sense if those transcribers spread around the world involve a handful of people working with some experimental encoding because it has not yet been worked out how all the details of the documents should be encoded, hence it's too early for a proposal, or the documents in question are not currently real candidates for incorporation into the standard (e.g. Phaistos), or they are insisting on encoding in some way that is counter to what experts has already agreed should be the preferred encoding for the characters in question. In general, interchange between document transcribers all around the world should be done the same way that interchange of digital texts should always be done: using an international character set encoding standard, preferably Unicode. If it's really worth interchanging, it's worth adding to Unicode. The Unicode coded character set continues to be an open set precisely because there are still characters worthy of interchange that are not yet part of the standard. - Peter --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Peter Constable Non-Roman Script Initiative, SIL International 7500 W. Camp Wisdom Rd., Dallas, TX 75236, USA Tel: +1 972 708 7485 E-mail: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
