Re: [OT] multilingual support in MS products (was Re: Kurdish ghayn)

At 12:18 PM 4/27/2003, Thomas Milo wrote:

> No Dutchman - whether he is involved in type or not  - can be amazed by the
> existence of IJ.

No one is amazed that it exists as a grapheme, but my Dutch colleagues are 
frequently surprised to discover that it is a *character* in Unicode, and 
they wonder why. Perhaps this is one of those characters that needs its 
story told: I've heard that it was encoded for backwards compatibility with 
an existing standard, but no one I've asked seems to know which standard, 
or whether this standard is still in use by anyone.

> Unicode deals with graphemes, and there IJ is already recognized as such.

No, Unicode deals with *characters*. There are plenty of graphemes in many 
languages that are composed of two or more characters, and which will never 
be encoded as distinct characters. Some months ago there was a lengthy 
discussion about the Slovak 'ch' digraph, in which it was patiently 
explained that there is nothing that can be done with a 'ch' character that 
cannot be done with a combination of 'c' and 'h'. I am not aware of any 
difference between this example and the Dutch IJ/ij case, other than that 
the latter existed in an older standard and so needed to be encoded for 
backwards compatibility. If this had not been the case, I don't believe the 
UTC would have been any more accepting of the Dutch IJ/ij than they would 
have been of any other digraph.

John Hudson

Tiro Typeworks          www.tiro.com
Vancouver, BC           tiro@xxxxxxxx

As for the technique of trimming the nib,
Do not be greedy!
I will not reveal its nuances; I withhold its secrets.
                  - Ibn al-Bawwab, Ra'iyyah