Re: Information Request.

[Shark8 <onewingedshark@gmail.com>]

On Friday, September 27, 2013 3:45:27 AM UTC-6, Austin Obyrne wrote:
> I’m Sure Somebody Knows This. 
> 
> Question: 
> 
> Unicode is a splendid solution to a huge problem but how does it work in practice.

Is it? The problem of "combining characters" seems to me to defeat that if there is any way to display the same character with different combining-sequences/codepoints. (e.g. "overstriking" w/ combining characters |S and S| to yield $ [just an example from my 105-key keyboard].) This is to say that there should be only one combination of combining-character to yield a glyph.

Another problem is casing. (e.g. how do you handle 'ß'? Does "ss" ever become 'ß'? Does 'ß' ever become 'S'?)

While there has been a lot of work on the Unicode standard, I'm not sure that (a) the majority of Unicode *users* understand the vision that the Unicode standard embodies, and (b) the Unicode standard has as clear an insight into matters as, say, the ARG has into Ada. (After all, Unicode is aiming to be a universal character-encoding scheme, and that requires an insight into *all* languages and their writing-systems, while the ARG is focused only on a single artificial/constructed language.)

> I would be very grateful to anybody who can shed light on how it is done in such cases especially from anybody with hands-on experience.

Well, you could try starting here:
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html