On 12/28/2016 5:47 PM, Richard Wordingham wrote:
On Tue, 27 Dec 2016 21:33:32 -0800
Asmus Freytag <[email protected]> wrote:
When it comes to marks (or symbols) of less generic or more complex
shapes, the
presumption that the mark only has "one" shape may be more common,
and examples of the mark
being repurposed may be less common. Not being as common, fewer
readers will
recognize all stylistic variations as being "the same thing". A
variant form will be more
likely to be understood as a related, but not identical symbol. That
in turn fuels the
misperception that Unicode somehow encodes symbols based on a single
conventional usage.
The idea of a single conventional usage is also fuelled by a number of
practices and policies:
1) A letter belongs to a single script (not to be confused with
writing system)
Making or not making that distinction makes some stuff easier and other
stuff
harder to support in software. Overall, I think Unicode got this one right.
2) Distinction of punctuation and modifier letters, e.g. the highly
confusing distinction between U+2019 RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK and
U+02BC MODIFIER LETTER APOSTROPHE
I'm beginning to thing that 02BC is closer to a mistake than a correct
solution;
there are places where it has to be treated on the same footing as 2019
even
though the idea was to give it different properties.
3) The resolution of U+002D HYPHEN-MINUS into U+2010 HYPHEN, U+2212
MINUS SIGN and a few minor punctuation marks
HYPHEN-MINUS is a bad example, because it's a conflation of several
quite distinct elements of type a single key for purposes of type writers.
4) Distinction between decimal digits and letters
5) The nightmare of spacing single and double dots.
? spacing vs. combining? Not sure what you mean.
Ideal solutions can also be defeated by limited keyboard layouts. As a
result, I have no idea whether the singular of "fithp" (one of Larry
Niven's alien species) should be spelt with U+02BC or U+2019, though in
ASCII I can just write "fi'".
The only place where "uni" doesn't apply in Unicode is that there's
never just
a single principle that applies, but always multiple ones that are in
tension --- and in
the edge cases, the tension can be felt keenly.
A./
Richard.
