From: "Michael Everson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > The glyphs are not normative.
I thought that you were exactly promoting the reverse. That's why I wanted to moderate things about glyphs. But Unicode still states that they are "representative", and it publishes them as they are necessary for correct identification of character identities. But if you want to insist more with your position, why not simply dropping completely all glyphs from the Unicode standard? I'm sure many people would not be happy, because the character identity would only be demonstrated by the normative properties, which include their often misleading assigned names... I maintain that if you remove the glyph shown for latin letter oi (considered only as informative and not mandatory in any of its aspects), and just keep its normative name, then many people will think that the encoded character really represents a letter named or pronounced "oi". Which is completely wrong in our case. But would allow people to use the assigned code point to represent the L-shaped character "i with lower-right hook"... Can't you admit the problem here with a so extreme position? You have here a position which is much more modulated in the published Unicode standard, which states that the published "representative" glyphs are representative, which means that at least the exhibited glyph can be safely used in ALL cases (yes, even if actual glyphs often have contextual forms, sometimes mandatory in some scripts or languages) to represent the character (also even if other glyphs are possible) without causing interpretation/reading problems in the rendered text. The problem we were discussing here is that only the informative and non-normative properties are giving the appropriate identity of the encoded letters, but NONE of the existing normative properties... So I really give some credits to these glyphs (and ISO/IEC 10646 too... as it just encodes repertoires of characters for the need of allowing unambiguous conversion of many legacy encodings into a common and unified repertoire). I did not say that these glyphs are mandatory for conformance, but the exact way these variations in glyphs are allowed is not described. (meaning that font designers must be extremely prudent before creating variants of these glyphs, as it may produce confusive texts in some tricky cases or with some languages for which the font design was not tested).
