🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <665@manutius.UUCP> nickn@manutius.UUCP (Nick Nussbaum) writes:

	....

   ah.. but the UNICODE revisions will include a large number of arabic
   ligatures. And upon request of the National body it will include a large 
   number of Korean Hangul composite characters. In fact, it seems it will 
   include ligatures from any non-European script. It won't include a large 
   set of European ligatures though. Just some. 

Now that is REALLY logical:  ligatures in some languages ARE characters and 
hence should be in UNICODE, while those in other (fi fl ff ffi ffl) are not.
Seems to me we need a `National Body' to lobby for us to rectify this mistake!

   The standard is a political compromise between the minimal encoding for
   linguistic purposes and the practical desire to subsume most computer
   character sets. Note that the unicode spec already includes zapf dingbats,
   p.c vector characters and 2 dot leaders. 

It's nice to have characters from Zapf Dingbats in there, but are these 
really more important than ligatures in Western languages?  Yes, I have
heard the phiolosphical and religious arguments about how ligatures are 
not `characters', but... 

   Unfortunately it doesn't include
   the rest of the common ligatures such as those in the Adobe Expert Set.
   Those will undoubtably be added by typographic vendors as private 
   extensions. 

That WON'T do. We cannot have commonly used ligatures with different numeric
codes in different vendor's fonts - that takes us right back to the problems
we have right now with encoding.

   What's sadder is that old style ( ranging ) figures aren't distinguished
   from lining figures that are the standard ascii fare. That means that when
   those are added into the private repetoire they'll miss being recognized by
   various functions that are numerically sensitive. Of course, they've always
   been wedged into font mapping for 8 bit codes, but this an old attempt to
   live with the limits of 8 bit encoding. 





Berthold K.P. Horn
Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA