On Fri, 30 Dec 2016 01:23:55 +0100 (CET) Marcel Schneider <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Wed, 28 Dec 2016 19:05:17 -0800, Asmus Freytag wrote: > > On 12/28/2016 5:47 PM, Richard Wordingham wrote: > U+02BC being shifted from a letter to a punctuation must have been > anticipated at encoding, since the original recommendation was to use > it as apostrophe throughout. Unifying the letter apostrophe and the > punctuation apostrophe made IMO more sense—despite of the conflicting > properties What conflicts? Both prototypically mark absences. The rationale seems to be that English uses both the punctuation apostrophe and the U+2019 RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK. If users aren't being trained to use U+2212 MINUS SIGN, and habitually disable grammar and spell-checking, most won't make the right choice between U+02BC and U+2019. > Perhaps the letters for hexadecimal digits should have been encoded > separately? The idea has been rejected several times. > > > 5) The nightmare of spacing single and double dots. > > ? spacing vs. combining? Not sure what you mean. > I think Richard refers to U+2024 ONE DOT LEADER and U+2025 TWO DOT > LEADER, along with U+002E FULL STOP. That's not the half of it. For starters, just look at the confusables for U+00B7 MIDDLE DOT: U+2022 BULLET U+2027 HYPHENATION POINT U+2219 BULLET OPERATOR U+22C5 DOT OPERATOR U+2E31 WORD SEPARATOR MIDDLE DOT U+30FB KATAKANA MIDDLE DOT There's an argument that the unification of U+00B7 and U+0387 ANO TELEIA is a unification too far. A font for Greek may need to work out which it is to position it correctly. For double dots, there're the confusables for U+003A COLON: U+05C3 HEBREW PUNCTUATION SOF PASUQ U+2236 RATIO There's a whole raft of visargas, some of which match and some of which don't. What happened to the principle that diacritics are unified by form? I suspect the answer is that encoding was established while principles were still developing. > > > 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'". > > Normally on an English or French keyboard layout, all three are > accessed on live keys. That accessibility is news to me - normally I just have to fight a word processor if I want U+0027. However, I still don't know whether to spell the word «fiʼ» or «fi’». I've only seen it in print. Richard.
