Arcane Jill scripsit: > I sometimes wonder whether or not it was a wise choice to regard "LATIN > SMALL LETTER I" and "LATIN SMALL LETTER DOTLESS I" as distinct. Too late > to change it now, of course, but (with the benefit of hindsight) it > occurs to me that if U+0069 had been regarded as dotless, all these > problems would never have arisen. Western fonts could still have > rendered it with a dot, Turkish fonts could have rendered it without a > dot, and everyone would have been happy.
Unicode didn't get any choice about it. The 8859-3 and 8859-9 equivalents separated dotted-i from dotless-i (Turkish needs both) and identified the former, not the latter, with the ASCII i. > As an analogy, albeit a rather silly one, if (in mathematics) I put a > dot over a (single-letter) variable name to indicate (say) first > derivative or something, I would have to put an /extra/ dot over i, > would I not? Does that not make it "conceptually" dotless, even though > it's rendered with a dot? In a sense that's correct: an i or j with an accent loses its dot, and if there is a dot present regardless, it is a dot-above diacritic and not the native dot. -- John Cowan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://www.ccil.org/~cowan Raffiniert ist der Herrgott, aber boshaft ist er nicht. --Albert Einstein
