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.
Not Turks and Azerbaijanis. They would face the prospect that their languages would be unrepresentable with standard fonts. Don't forget that these languages also have a dotted small i which is a distinct letter.
It would actually make more sense to specify U+0049 as dotted and that multi-purpose fonts should render it with a dot, with the dotless version as a glyph variant for localised use only. After all, a dot on I is acceptable in English etc, used in a few fonts, and leads to no ambiguity (except when one of these fonts is used to write Turkish or Azerbaijani!). Your suggestion would create far more confusion.
But let's stick to what we have got rather than try to change anything now.
-- Peter Kirk [EMAIL PROTECTED] (personal) [EMAIL PROTECTED] (work) http://www.qaya.org/
