Re: [OT] multilingual support in MS products

John M. Fiscella <profirst at compuserve dot com> wrote:

> Message text written by "Doug Ewell"
> >In fact, solving problems like this in the proper Unicode way might
> go a long way toward convincing the Dutch contingent that the need for
> U+0132 and U+0133 is overstated.<
>
> But how many sorters or other text processors access the Unicode
> SpecialCasting.txt during their processing?

Probably not many.  Most probably use some sort of internal table or
algorithm.  But SpecialCasing.txt, along with the rest of the UCD,
defines how those algorithms should function and what entries the tables
should have.

Whatever technique Turkish-aware programs currently use to recognize (I
and ı) and (İ and i) as case pairs, something similar should be done to
Dutch-aware programs so they recognize IJ as an inseparable digraph with
special casing behavior.  This is *much* better than dragging the IJ and
ij compatibility characters out of the closet.

-Doug Ewell
 Fullerton, California
 http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/