Jungshik Shin wrote: > IMHO, their use of 'support' (for Hangul Jamo and various > S&SE Asian scripts) goes beyond the flexibility limit I perceive the > word to have. [...]
I agree: in their list of supported languages, many "yes"'s should by "partially" or "yes but...". However, I think that UniPad remains a very nice piece of software, and I am confident that they will finally reach full support of all scripts. But consider that it is a low-priority job, because it gives no income to the company producing it, so allow them to take their time. Currently, I see UniPad as a sort of "debugging editor", i.e. a tools for inspecting the details of the encoding without the "obfuscation" of complex-script display transformations. I hope that this "low level view" will remain as an option even when full complex scripts will be implemented. When programming, it is sometimes useful to have the possibility of temporarily disabling all the complexity of Unicode display (bidirectionality, combining glyphs, ligatures, format controls, etc.), and be able to interact with the crude code points. > > UniPad does include glyphs for individual jamos as > > well as precomposed Hangul syllables, which is more than most > > non-Korean-specific TrueType fonts can offer. > > Which is still far from supporting Hangul Jamos. This is true. But they also claim that they support "Conversion to Precomposed Characters" (see http://www.unipad.org/techinfo/features/sub_general.html). If this is correctly implemented also for Hangul syllables, one could see it as a very rudimentary support of modern Korean. OK still quite far from the real thing, anyway. By the way, I never saw a proper johab system in action, and I cannot figure out how certain details are supposed to work. For instance, what should the combining jamos look like while they are being typed? - E.g., imagine I am writing <m-> <a> <-r> <k-> <o>: what should the initial <m-> look like while I haven't yet entered the vowel? - And what happens when I add vowel <a>: does it immediately form syllable <ma> or does it wait to see if a trailing consonant follows? I also wonder whether and how it is possible to edit the components of a completed syllable. - Can I go on syllable <ma> and overtype the <m-> with another consonant? - Can I delete the <m-> leaving a stand-alone vowel? And, in this case, what does the <a> look like: is the consonant's slot left empty, or is it filled by some sort placeholder? - And what does the cursor look like during these operations? - Does the cursor highlight the proper parts of the syllable, or is the syllable temporarily converted into a series of spacing glyphs? _ Marco
