On 09/08/2004 18:30, Mike Ayers wrote:
...
> Mozilla, and lots of other software can't handle mixing > markup and combining marks or characters.
Hmmm... Don't want to start a war, but I do have to ask.
Isn't this correct behavior? Doesn't the code above explicitly separate the two codepoints to prevent them from being rendered as a sequence? I mean, if I wanted to display nu, then macron, without combining behavior, wouldn't this be one way to do it? ...
This is an interesting one in the light of discussions elsewhere on Hebrew Holam. If you really want nu followed by a non-combining macron, Unicode has defined ways of doing this. Inserting ZWNJ is *not* one of them, and I wouldn't expect any kind of break or control character to have this effect by default. The correct way to do this is probably to insert SPACE or NBSP, or the proposed INVISIBLE CHARACTER. And then of course there is the spacing clone of the macron, U+00AF.
But then this makes me realise that the problem someone has recognised with ZWNJ and combining characters in MS Word may be because ZWNJ is somehow interpreted as in a different font or otherwise having separate markup, perhaps because there is no ZWNJ glyph in the seleted font.
... Combining across markup seems counterintuitive (and a violation of layering) to me.I wouldn't consider this a violation of layering. If layer A has to split a string at a particular place because of its own functions, that does not imply a break at layer B. And it is certainly a legitimate user requirement for a combining mark to be in a different colour from its base character. What is the best way to represent that is debatable, but some kind of markup at this point should not be ruled out in principle.
In any case markup cannot be allowed to break all intelligent font features. Should kerning be broken because a particular letter is in a different colour or underlined?
-- Peter Kirk [EMAIL PROTECTED] (personal) [EMAIL PROTECTED] (work) http://www.qaya.org/
