Re: interesting SIL-document

[Bob_Hallissy]

On 03/02/2004 11:22:54 Peter Kirk wrote:

>It is interesting that SIL has seen the need to include precomposed
>combinations with U+0321 palatalized hook and U+0322 retroflex hook.
>Perhaps this is because these diacritics cannot be automatically
>combined with their base characters.

Rather, it is because after discussions with various members of UTC it seems that the U+0321 and U+0322 were not really intended to be used productively. Cf U+01AB which has no decomposition.

>They can of course be included in
>an OpenType etc font as ligatures, but only if the rendering engine
>supports complex rendering with Latin script - for which the Office 2003
>version of Uniscribe is required. But I note that several characters
>which are effectively combinations with U+0334 are listed as "approved
>for addition to Unicode".

Similarly, the overstrike/overlay diacritics (U+0334 .. U+0338) were never intended to be productive and should generally be avoided -- you will note they are never used in decompositions (except 0338 is used with some arrows).

>It would be good if Microsoft could put an end to the need for such
>kludges (at least on Windows) by releasing this recent version of
>Uniscribe as a Windows update.

Releasing regular/free updates to Uniscribe would be helpful for a number of reasons and I certainly agree it would be a helpful thing for Microsoft to do. However, it wouldn't have much of an impact on the characters SIL have chosen to encode for our own use in the PUA. Specifically, we have tried not to violate Unicode's encoding principles, and believe that most of the characters we have in the PUA stand a good chance of being included into Unicode at some point in the future when sufficient supporting evidence is available.

Bob