🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <ISHIKAWA.93Jan20182546@ds5200.personal-media.co.jp> ishikawa@personal-media.co.jp writes:
 > Why not unify Latin/Cyrillic/Greek 'A'?  This simple question also is
 > the cause of uncomfortable feeling many Japanese programmers seem to
 > have (including myself).
 > 
I understand that.  I think some unification might be done with the LCG
glyphs.  But the LCG scripts have the feature that each glyph comes in
two forms: majuscule and minuscule.  The distinction between the two
forms is very small, in many cases it does not matter whether the
majuscule form or the minuscule form is used (e.g. sorting).  But that
breaks down unification of Latin/Cyrillic and Greek 'A' because the
minuscule form is different.  Still worse are examples like 'T' and
'B' where the minuscule form is different for all three.  On the other
hand, I do not think Unicode is consistent (I do not know for sure, when
I tried to buy the book it was sold out).  I think that Turkish dotless
and dot-having 'I' both share half a code point with the Latin 'I'.  My
preference would be three (times two) code points: Latin 'I', Turkish
'I' with dot and Turkish 'I' without dot.  But I (as a westerner)
understand why it is not done.  It is impossible to distinguish the
majuscule Latin 'I' from the Turkish majuscule dotless 'I'.  Which
would make it more difficult for the user.  On the other hand, as a
programmer, I see the difficulty in doing a case insensitive search.
With the two Turkish 'I's there will be more false matches unless
language is coded also, but again, that makes it more difficult for
the user.  But I think that unification of those majuscule/minuscule
glyphs that are (upto font differences) identical would make sense.
This includes Latin/Cyrillic 'A/a', 'J/j' (is the latter included
in Cyrillic?) and Latin/Cyrillic/Greek 'O/o'.

As I understand it, part of the problems with CJK unification are of
a similar nature.  While the base character is the same there may be
different simplifications.  But that is only as far as I understand it.
-- 
dik t. winter, cwi, kruislaan 413, 1098 sj  amsterdam, nederland
home: bovenover 215, 1025 jn  amsterdam, nederland; e-mail: dik@cwi.nl