On Wednesday, August 6, 2003, at 3:53 PM, Peter Kirk wrote:
This answer presupposes that there is a well-defined concept of which base character a combining mark belongs to. That is not always true. The particukar combining mark which precipitated the debate may be situated above the gap between the (logically and phonetically) preceding and following characters, or may move on to the preceding or the following characters depending on the precise context and on the typographer's preference.
If its behavior is substantially different from that of existing combining marks, then there's no reason not to suggest it be added with its own properties. Just don't add it as a combining mark. (This is basically what happened, e.g., with the ideographic description characters.)
Anyway, John J, what code are we talking about that has to work from the positions of the combining marks back to the underlying representation? Are you talking about OCR?
No, the issue is more how to start from a base form and work forward to encompass the whole series of characters which need to be treated "as one" in certain processes, which can include cursor movement, hit testing, display, line breaking, collation, normalization.
======== John H. Jenkins [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://homepage..mac.com/jhjenkins/
