Re: Rendering of ellipsis for different scripts

> Rimas Kudelis wrote:
>> Second, I believe that this would defeat the purpose of Unicode (which
>> is to be consistent, no matter what the context or language is).
>
> (I'm setting the follow-up on i18n again).
>
> No, the purpose of Unicode is to encode abstract characters, that are
> recognised as representing the same element, but can have very various
> graphical representations (glyphs) depending on both context and language.
>
> http://unicode.org/reports/tr17/#CharactersVsGlyphs
> "The elements of the character repertoire are abstract characters.
> Characters are different from glyphs, which are the particular images
> representing a character or part of a character. Glyphs for the same
> character may have very different shapes"
> "[...] the connection between glyphs and characters is at times even
> less direct. Glyphs may be required to change their shape, position and
> width depending on the surrounding glyphs"
>
> Chinese characters unification is the reference case where the
> appearance is very dependent on the language :
> http://unicode.org/faq/han_cjk.html#3
> "Q: If the character shapes are different in different parts of East
> Asia, why were the characters unified?
>
> A: The Unicode standard is designed to encode characters, not glyphs.
> Even where there are substantial variations in the standard way of
> writing a character from locale to locale, if the fundamental identity
> of the character is not in question, then a single character is encoded
> in Unicode."
>
>> I'd rather think it's stated somewhere else (perhaps even in Unicode
>> standard) that the ellipsis itself can be expressed by using different
>> characters, depending on the language used. But those different
>> characters have their own codepoints, I guess.
>
> As seen above, definitively no. There is one and one only unicode
> character to represent the ellipsis, U2026, and the preferred glyph to
> represent it will depend on language and cultural preferences.
>
> If you want a nice display, you need to carry that language an cultural
> preferences information into your display engine.