Unicode organization is still anti-Serbian and anti-Macedonian

Richard Wordingham richard.wordingham at ntlworld.com
Sat Feb 15 12:25:51 CST 2014


On Fri, 14 Feb 2014 02:37:19 -0800
Крушевљанин <Perka at muchomail.com> wrote:

> There is still problem with letters бгдпт in italic, and б in regular
> mode.

> OpenType support is still very weak (Firefox, LibreOffice on Linux,
> Adobe's software and that's it, practically). It's also disappointing
> that Microsoft is still incapable to implement and force this support
> on system level.

I'll be interested to know what stops Gentium Plus, suggested by Otto
Stolz, from working on, say, Windows 7.  I'm very sure the support is
there at a system level - the problem (if any) is more likely to be
at an application level.  Does LibreOffice on Windows not support
Serbian italics?   

> Also, there are Serbian/Macedonian cyrillic vowels with accents
> (total: 7 types × 6 possible letters = 42 combinations) where
> majority of them don't exist precomposed, and is impossible to enter
> them. A lot of nowadays' fonts (even commercial) still have issues
> with accents.

Should these combinations be well known?  They're not listed in the
CLDR exemplar characters for Serbian.

As for input, I would suggest that the solution for the simpler
keyboarding techniques is to enter them as base character and then dead
key.  Dead keys could be available for more advanced input systems,
e.g. ibus on Linux and 'text services' on Windows (Vista and above, I
believe).

> In Unicode, Latin scripts are always favored, which is simply not
> fair to the rest of the world. They have space to put glyphs for
> dominoes, a lot of dead languages etc. but they don't have space for
> real-world issues.

Precomposed characters are an unpleasant feature in Unicode.  I am
curious as to how the Serbian combinations escaped notice.  When are
they actually used?  Each precomposed character adds a small processing
overhead to an extremely large number of computers, not just to the
computers that actually use it.  By contrast, dominoes can be ignored
when no-one using the computer is using the characters for them.

Richard.




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