In like manner The Yoruba Digital Consortium www.africaservice.com/yorubadigital might push the idea of e, o with dot below and grave or acute accent to make it easier for font and keyboard developers to implement.
What do you think? Dele Olawole ----- Original Message ----- From: "Philippe Verdy" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Doug Ewell" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Cc: "Unicode List" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Wednesday, May 05, 2004 7:27 PM Subject: Re: Just if and where is the then? > From: "Doug Ewell" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > I guarantee you that creating a new 8-bit encoding specific to the > > language(s) you are dealing with, and getting fonts developed for that > > encoding, and trying to exchange data in this new encoding with others, > > will cause more problems for the university than working with Unicode. > > For your university yes, most probably, but for local native users of the script > I would disagree, there's a radically different usage and need pattern between > interchanged data in a heterogeneous environment, and local usage. > > I'm not advocating for any private definition of a new 8-bit charset. But I find > nothing wrong if a country standardization body wants to promote its own charset > to help increase the stability of orthographs, and define a stable subset > appropriate for a language. If such charsets gets to a national standard; it > will give incitations to font makers so that they make the few additions needed > in their Unicode fonts. > > That's something which seems impossible to ask to font makers when they are > exposed to tens of thousands of combinations of letters and diacritics: unless > there's a well known standard that exposes the needed combinations, many of them > will remain untested and they won't feel that the addition is necessary to > support users communities in some countries, because they will feel, that > there's no market incitation to make these corrections. > > See how GB18030, whose support for commercial usages was made mandatory, helped > to improve the support of larger charsets than the many incomplete ones that > were initially made for limited usages badly targeted for China. Since then, the > support of Chinese with Unicode has been considerably enhanced on most > platforms. > > National or regional official standards are a great help to improve the correct > support of languages. This does not limit the development of Unicode for > interchanges, even if locally the data can be processed more easily by smaller > subsets. > > I would say the same for other subsets already registered with ISO/IEC 10646, > such as European ones: subsets with multiple levels help understanding which > characters should have a priority support for a relevant market. Microsoft made > a similar initiative by pushing foundries to support at least the WGL4 subset in > their fonts. > > Unicode will remain the worldwide interoperability solution, but I see nothing > wrong in regional development initiatives. > > >
