On Sunday, August 10, 2003 9:30 AM, Mark Davis <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > As for oe-ligature, the > > French representative to WG3 (or its predecessor) said that France > > could live without it. > > Even worse; the story I heard was that the committee had planned from > the start to have Œ and œ in positions D7 and F7, but that late in the > process the representative from France objected, so they replaced them > by × and ÷. That would certainly explain why these symbols are in the > middle of a batch of letters... It's true that in French these are really ligatures, and not plain letters, meaning that this is mostly a standard typographic convention, rather than orthographic. The national AFNOR may have opted for this solution thinking that these holes would have benfited for other languages commonly used in Europe, and there were probably other candidate characters that finally got encoded in a separate ISO-8859-* set. I don't know which compromize was taken, but the origin DEC VT set also had holes at those positions. It's just strange that the ISO working group opted for those two characters at D7 and F7, when there could have been a pair of characters coded for Finnish, or Catalan (like the dotted L which is still coded with a separate middle dot symbol instead of a true diacritic, and that renders quite poorly with ISO-8859-1 and even with Windows 1252). Well, French and Catalan writers have lived with those encoded sequences, and fixed the rendering using ligating rules in their renderers or fonts (or used the oe/OE ligatures in Windows1252). I just suspect that the French objection on oe/OE was related to the fear of modifying keyboards that were previously created based on the French version of ISO646, where such ligature could not be coded. Since then, the AFNOR version of ISO646-FR has been simplified to remove the tricky combining sequences built with BACKSPACE, like C+BACKSPACE+COMMA to code a C WITH CEDILLA, as they were no longer necessary with a more universally used 8-bit set (7-bit sets have survived only within Teletex/Videotex standards, built in accordance with ISO646 with SS2 sequences to encode non-spacing diacritics *before* the base character with which they combine, to match the keyboard input order based on dead keys for combining diacritics, and this 7-bit set is probably the only one remaining in large use today for French, with ISO646-FR now nearly extinct in favor of ISO646-US/ASCII) -- Philippe. Spams non tolérés: tout message non sollicité sera rapporté à vos fournisseurs de services Internet.
