We don't have any set terminology for what you're talking about. We've often just used 'misspelling' in a broad sense, which can include visually confusable or identical glyphs. For example, spelling 'of' with an omicron would be one, as well as a word in a complex script with swapped marks. And cases of the former occur surprisingly often in web pages: probably to do with people switching keyboards in mid-stride. They are in (say) a Greek keyboard, hit omicron and then the Greek character in the 'f' position, notice it is wrong, and backspace — but just over the character that 'looks' wrong — then type 'f'.
The problem with using the term "miscoding" is that it is overloaded. It can be used as having something to do with the character encoding level: for example, interpreting a string of UTF-8 bytes as Latin-1. The sequence <omicron, f> is a perfectly valid Unicode string, not — in that sense — miscoded. Mark On Thu, Jan 19, 2017 at 2:12 AM, Richard Wordingham < [email protected]> wrote: > On Wed, 18 Jan 2017 13:35:55 -0700 > "Doug Ewell" <[email protected]> wrote: > > > Richard Wordingham wrote: > > > > > I think it is not a 'typographical error' if it renders as it > > > should! > > > > What if it renders correctly on some systems but not on others? > > > I do see your point, though. Writing systems that permit different > > spellings of the same glyph (cluster), only one of which is 'correct' > > even after normalization, can be tricky like this. I think this would > > still be a matter of 'misspelling' rather than 'miscoding' because a > > typist should not have to be concerned with character codes per se. > > As you've put it, it sounds like the way things were with a simple Thai > typewriter. A vowel below, a vowel above and a tone mark could be > typed in any order, as though they had three different non-zero > combining classes. Thais were trained to type into computers by input > routines only accepting the marks in the correct order - this was > before the days of canonical combining classes. > > In the case of greatest concern to me, there can be two different > orders, but only one is appropriate for a given word. In most cases, > only one word of that appearance exists, and one can usually guess which > one does exist. (That is why the system works despite the occasional > ambiguity.) It's not unlike how Thai would work had phonetic order > been successfully insisted upon, except that there is no evidence that > sorting should be by appearance, whereas in Thai as it was encoded > before Unicode (and is now, after normalisation), encoding and sorting > are based purely on appearance. (Well, officially - in practice, Thais > appear to sort by doing syllable-by-syllable comparisons.) > > In this case of concern, the range of renderings is occasionally > different, which is another reason that two different encodings for the > same appearance must be tolerated. > > Richard. >
