Speaking purely as an old fart, I'd say the former. We already break the latter principle in Thai and Lao, and having be prepared to scan either forward or backward from a base character in order to find its combining marks would add overhead to a lot of code, including existing code.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.
On Wednesday, August 6, 2003, at 2:16 PM, John Cowan wrote:
I would like to ask the old farts^W^Wrespected elders of the UTC which principle they consider more important, abstractly speaking: the principle that combining marks always follow their base characters (a typographical principle), or that text is stored, with a few minor exceptions, in phonetic order (a lexicographical principle).
======== John H. Jenkins [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://homepage..mac.com/jhjenkins/
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?
-- Peter Kirk [EMAIL PROTECTED] (personal) [EMAIL PROTECTED] (work) http://www.qaya.org/
