Kirai Rat Decompositions, was Re: Compatibility decomposables that are not compatibility characters

Mark E. Shoulson mark at kli.org
Fri Feb 18 13:46:13 CST 2022


Perhaps relevant to this thread, I was just reading in 
https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2022/22043-kirat-rai.pdf L2/22-043, proposal 
to encode Kirai Rat Script, where it remarks regarding the vowels:

> These should all be encoded atomically. This is because linguistically 
> these vowels are not composed of two separatecharacters, they are 
> single vowels in their own right. It is true that the custom encoded 
> Kirat Rai font uses decomposedvowel signs as a matter of expediency, 
> but this decision should not influence the right way to encode the 
> script.Because the glyph for some of the vowels (aa and e) are part of 
> the shape of the last 3 vowels (ai, o, au) there shouldbe canonical 
> decompositions for the last 3 vowels. With these decompositions, Do 
> Not Use tables are not necessary.
If the vowels are to be encoded atomically, and it sounds like they 
should be, shouldn't we *not* want to have canonical decompositions for 
them?  I thought Unicode was trying to avoid precomposed characters at 
this point.  I guess it's too late to hope for "only one right way to 
spell it" out of Unicode, but is that still something we try to 
approach?  It almost seems to me that canonical decompositions also stem 
from cases of "things that wouldn't be encoded if they were proposed 
now," and if so it would not really make sense to propose anything with 
a canonical decomposition.  Or am I misunderstanding the attitude 
towards canonical decompositions, or the proposal's statement?

~mark
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://corp.unicode.org/pipermail/unicode/attachments/20220218/198540e0/attachment.htm>


More information about the Unicode mailing list