Fantasai asked: > I would like to request that Unicode include, for each writing system it > encodes, some information on how it might justify. >
Following up on the comment and examples provided by Richard Wordingham, I'd like to emphasize a relevant point: Scripts may be used for *multiple* (different) writing systems. Rules for justification of text are aspects of writing systems, orthographies, and typographical conventions -- and are not inherent properties of scripts. So while there may be strong tendencies for certain scripts to fall into certain typographical practices, including behavior for text justification, I don't think that information is inherent to scripts per se. And it would be misleading and gardenpathy for the Unicode Standard to try to treat justification as somehow inhering to scripts. Note also that there are many cases where there is even argumentation over the edge cases for script identity -- where one script's behavior bleeds into another's historically, or where the status of certain elements as borrowed elements from another script into a certain orthography or as nativized elements borrowed from another script *into* a script (thereby requiring separate encoding). I think it would make more sense to turn fantasai's query on its head, as it were: First categorize what kinds of systems of justification there are, and then start filling in, from best understood out to the fringes of knowledge of practice, what writing systems (using what script or combination of scripts) are attested as regularly using each system. Lacunae are inevitable, however. I think it is just a mistake to assume from a query on the Script property identity of a character, what justification rule should apply to it in text. Note also that for many scripts there is no established modern typographical practice, so it is basically unknown or meaningless to ask what the justification rules are for it. Modern typographers setting old material will eventually make up the rules, and those will *become* the answer, but the Unicode Consortium cannot look at pictures of fragmentary Byzantine seals or fragments of papyri and *determine* what some normative (or even informative) property of justification should be for the script in such a record. --Ken _______________________________________________ Unicode mailing list [email protected] http://unicode.org/mailman/listinfo/unicode
