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From: vladimirg(at)need.bg
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Date: 10 Jul 2003 08:24:01 -0000
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Subject: Combining diacriticals and Cyrillic
Body: Dear Ladys and Gentlemen,

Currently there is an ongoing effort in Bulgaria trying to resolve an 
issuie concerning the way we write in Bulgarian. 

Our problem is: 

Usually a bulgarian regular user does not need to write accented characters.
 There is one middle-sized exclusion of this, but generally we do fine 
without accented characters. The problem is that in some special 
cases or more serious lingustic work, one definetely needs to be able 
to write accented characters (accented vowels). 

One of the ideas is to invent a new ASCII-based encodings, 
containing the accented characters we need. This would 
introduce an additional disorder in the current mess of 
cyrillic encodings, and would introduce problems with automated spellcheck.

Generally I beleive it would be best to invent a Unicode based solution.

Such a solution is for example, combining diacritical signs with 
the cyrillic symbols. 

I composed a demo page: 
http://v.bulport.com/bugs/opera/426/balhaah_lonex_org/ 

and then made 10-20 shots of the results on Opera and IE on Linux, 
Windows 98 and Windows XP: 
http://v.bulport.com/bugs/opera/426/balhaah_lonex_org/shots.html 

You can see that this approach yields _quite_ incosistent and 
useless results, depending on the font, application and operating 
system being used. 

Finally, I wonder if you could give us some advice: 

1. 
Is it possible somehow to improve this approach? I imagine eg., if 
the font can provide prepared combined symbols whenever the application 
asks for a combined cyrillic+diacritical, instead of leaving 
the application to do the combination.

2. 
Do you see other unicode based approach to the Bulgarian problem? 

3. 
Do you beleive the approach should be looked for outside Unicode? 

Please excuse me for wasting your time, 
Vladimir, 
Bulgaria