In the discussion about romanization of Cyrillic ligatures I asked how one expresses in Unicode the ts ligature with a dot above.
Regarding Ken's response to the Byzantine legal codes matter, it would appear possible that the way that the ts ligature with a dot above for romanization of Cyrillic could be represented in Unicode would be by the following sequence. t U+FE20 s U+FE21 U+0307 The ordinary ts ligature for romanization of Cyrillic being expressed as follows. t U+FE20 s U+FE21 The second example is from the recent thread on Romanized Cyrillic bibliographic data. In the recent thread about Byzantine legal codes, the following sequences were suggested. U+0069 U+0313 U+0301 U+0055 U+0313 The second of the above requiring a rendering different from what direct reading of the Unicode specification might suggest. Ken's reply seems to suggest that display of such sequences would be renderer dependent or font dependent. It appears to me that the ts ligature with a dot above, and a similar ng ligature with a dot above, are already needed for the Library of Congress romanization of Cyrillic system. The following directory contains a lot of pdf files. http://lcweb.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/romanization The ts ligature with a dot above can be found on page 2 of the nonslav.pdf file. The ng ligature with a dot above can be found on page 13 of the same file. Capital letter versions of the two ligatures are needed as well. The two sequences U+0069 U+0313 U+0301 and U+0055 U+0313 mentioned above, and possibly others, will be needed for the Byzantine legal codes. It seems to me that this matter of sequences of combining characters being used to give glyphs where different meanings are needed other than just locally and that glyphs for such meanings are only correctly displayed if a particular rendering system or a particular font are used touches at the roots of the Unicode system. It seems to me that the glyphs for such sequences are being left as if they were a Private Use Area unregulated system. I recognize that fonts have glyph variations in that, say, an Arial letter b looks different to a Bookman Old Style letter b, yet in that case the meaning is the same. I wonder if consideration could please be given as to whether this matter should be left unregulated or whether some level of regulation should be used. William Overington 18 September 2002
