« Return to Thread: Rendering of ellipsis for different scripts

Re: Rendering of ellipsis for different scripts

by Rimas Kudelis-2 :: Rate this Message:

| View in Thread

Jean-Marc Desperrier rašė:

> 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."

Hmm....

Actually, I think you're wrong about this particular case.

Check http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U3000.pdf, which depicts a few
CJK punctuation symbols, like IDEOGRAPHIC COMMA and IDEOGRAPHIC FULL
STOP, for example.

I tend to think, that if there actually exists a tradition to use an
ellipsis character in Japanese, then perhaps there should be something
like an IDEOGRAPHIC ELLIPSIS character in Unicode (similarly to the
above cases).

Remember, that our actual problem is that the user runs an English
version of Firefox (or any other Latin or even Cyrillic script-based
language version anyway) on Japanese version of Windows. I can't say for
sure, and I guess we should consult someone with a good knowledge in
Japanese here, but perhaps the problem we're dealing with now is
actually nothing but a bug in MS UI Gothic?

Oh, and by the way, a similar question has already been raised by Nokia
five years ago(!) on a mailing list of w3c. Here's the thread:
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-international/2002OctDec/0102.html
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-international/2002OctDec/0110.html
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-international/2002OctDec/0115.html

RQ
_______________________________________________
dev-i18n mailing list
dev-i18n@...
https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-i18n

 « Return to Thread: Rendering of ellipsis for different scripts