To: From: Kent Karlsson kentk(at)cs.chalmers.se Received: (qmail 23411 invoked by uid 0); 10 Jul 2003 10:00:16 -0000 from pheidippides.md.chalmers.se ((at)129.16.237.91) by ns.need.bg with SMTP; 10 Jul 2003 10:00:16 -0000 from chalmers95a69n (elek-4-213.chl.chalmers.se [129.16.214.213]) by pheidippides.md.chalmers.se (8.10.1/8.10.1) with ESMTP id h6AA0AB03736 for ; Thu, 10 Jul 2003 12:00:10 +0200 (MET DST) Date: Thu, 10 Jul 2003 11:57:01 +0200 XMailer: Microsoft Outlook, Build 10.0.2627 MIMEVersion: 1.0 ContentType: text/plain; charset=windows-1251 XPriority: Importance: Normal Subject: RE: Combining diacriticals and Cyrillic Body: Hi Vladimir! > 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. Please don't. Next to nobody will ever support it. > 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. Yes, this has much greater chance of success. However, the support for rendering combining diacritics for Latin/Greek/Cyrillic is as yet not great. Probably because one hasn't felt the need to be urgent. So the results are somewhat poor as yet. > 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. Yes, but the system using the fonts have to be prepared to use them too. This will surely improve in future versions, especially if that is lobbied for. A help could be to provide a list of which combinations need be supported (better than other arbitrary combinations). > 2. > Do you see other unicode based approach to the Bulgarian problem? No, since the allocation of new precomposed characters is in practice blocked; they would be removed in all Unicode normalisations of the text. > 3. > Do you beleive the approach should be looked for outside Unicode? No. Kind regards /Kent Karlsson