NamesList, Code Charts, ISO/IEC 10646

[Richard Wordingham]

On Mon, 04 May 2015 08:32:46 -0700
"Asmus Freytag (t)" <asmus-inc at ix.netcom.com> wrote:

> On 5/4/2015 6:47 AM, Richard Wordingham wrote:

> > I suspect the idea is to have a way of unobtrusively supplying the
> > Bidi_Mirrored value in a character pick-list, namely the use of the
> > words 'OPENING' and 'CLOSING' rather than 'LEFT' and 'RIGHT'.
> 
> Reading this discussion, I sometimes wonder whether people have ever 
> heard of character properties?

I believe most ordinary computer users have not heard of them.  Most
people do not knowingly have the UCD to hand, or even UnicodeData.txt.

> No way to pack all the information into the name, and even character 
> properties aren't covering all of them.

Unfortunately, when choosing a character from a character picker, the
most help one is likely to get is the character name.  The name is
actually quite useful when the glyph is not as one expects or the
distinguishing features are not readily visible.

Sometimes, however, the names are distinctly unhelpful. Perhaps
'DEVANAGARI DANDA' should have a correcting alias 'DANDA' (or 'INDIAN
DANDA'?) to reassure people that it is also the Bengali/Tamil etc.
danda. 

> > I for one don't want to have to choose a non-English
> > locale to type right-to-left text.
> Non-sequitur?

No.  The clear issue raised was of knowing whether a character's glyph
would change with the bidi context.  One solution that immediately
comes to mind is to display the character in a pick list according to
the user's locale. Unfortunately, that will not always work.  In these
days of Unicode, locales are primarily useful for determining the user
interface.

Richard.