3 ms·

> It's the visual that matters. I expect a good search function for my electronic book! > Again, semantics are divined from context. I gave an explicit count

> It's the visual that matters. I expect a good search function for my electronic book! > Again, semantics are divined from context. I gave an explicit counterexample. You can't distinguish an IPA `ɑ` (open back unrounded vowel) from an IPA `a` (open front unrounded vowel) with just a context---[hɑt] and [hat] are different pronunciations. So they have to be differently encoded, right? And due to its history, either the "normal" `a` glyph will exactly look like one of them, depending on the font. So we can't have perfectly distinct glyphs for distinct code points anyway. Maybe we need a better rationale, something like semantics...

WalterBright 3y ago
We have many words that are spelled the same, but sound different based on context, like "sow". That isn't a problem. They don't have to be differently encoded. Besides, are you now planning on adding accents and dialect pronunciations, too?
- lifthrasiir 3y ago
  I'm not talking about homonyms (but I wasn't clear enough about that, sorry). I'm talking about the exact alphabets describing pronunciations. Honestly I can't really differentiate [hɑt] and [hat] sounds, but their IPA renditions are clearly different and have to be differently encoded.
  - WalterBright 3y ago
    > have to be differently encoded. They don't. It's a fake problem.
    - lifthrasiir 3y ago
      So you have two different pronunciations [hat] and [hat]. Which one is which? Do you really expect to say "[hat] as in General American hot" and "[hat] as in Received Pronunciation hat" every time? Isn't the IPA supposed to be an unambiguous transcription (so to say)?
    - iainmerrick 3y ago
      It’s a fake problem if you just want to write the word “sow” or “hat”, sure, but if you want to write the IPA pronunciation of a word you need the IPA characters in your charset. Wikipedia has those IPA pronunciations and they’re useful. How else would you do that without including those characters in Unicode? Would you rather have them as images?
WalterBright 3y ago
> good search function If there are 5 encodings for the glyph 'a', how are you going to know which one to search for? And there's no guarantee whatsoever which encoding the author used, or if he used them consistently. Your search function is going to be unreliable at best. After all, if I was writing algebra, I'd use the ASCII 'a' not the math glyph. So will most everyone else but the most pedantic.
- lifthrasiir 3y ago
  > If there are 5 encodings for the glyph 'a', how are you going to know which one to search for? There are two possible cases and Unicode covers both of them. For the case of IPA `ɑ`, it is a distinct character from `a` (which doubles as an IPA) so results containing `ɑ` will be ignored. But this is not far from I want, because `a` and `ɑ` are distinct in IPA and the search correctly distinguishes them. I would have to type `ɑ` to get the other results, but this is an irrelevant matter. For the case of mathematical alphanumerics, they do normalize to normal counterparts in the compatibility mapping (i.e. NFKC or NFKD). The compatibility mapping disregards some minor differences and would be useful in this case. Of course I would like to narrow the search so that only mathematical alphanumerics match (or the inverse)---this is why Unicode defines multiple levels of comparison [1]. Assuming the default collation table, all mathematical alphanumerics are considered different from normal letters only at the level 3, while IPA `ɑ` is different at the level 1 (but sorts immediately after all `a`s). [1] https://unicode.org/reports/tr10/#Multi_Level_Comparison https://unicode.org/reports/tr10/#Multi_Level_Comparison > After all, if I was writing algebra, I'd use the ASCII 'a' not the math glyph. What I would type in TeX doesn't exactly relate to the actual encoding.

WalterBright 3y ago

We have many words that are spelled the same, but sound different based on context, like "sow". That isn't a problem. They don't have to be differently encoded. Besides, are you now planning on adding accents and dialect pronunciations, too?

lifthrasiir 3y ago
I'm not talking about homonyms (but I wasn't clear enough about that, sorry). I'm talking about the exact alphabets describing pronunciations. Honestly I can't really differentiate [hɑt] and [hat] sounds, but their IPA renditions are clearly different and have to be differently encoded.
- WalterBright 3y ago
  > have to be differently encoded. They don't. It's a fake problem.
  - lifthrasiir 3y ago
    So you have two different pronunciations [hat] and [hat]. Which one is which? Do you really expect to say "[hat] as in General American hot" and "[hat] as in Received Pronunciation hat" every time? Isn't the IPA supposed to be an unambiguous transcription (so to say)?
  - iainmerrick 3y ago
    It’s a fake problem if you just want to write the word “sow” or “hat”, sure, but if you want to write the IPA pronunciation of a word you need the IPA characters in your charset. Wikipedia has those IPA pronunciations and they’re useful. How else would you do that without including those characters in Unicode? Would you rather have them as images?

WalterBright 3y ago

> good search function If there are 5 encodings for the glyph 'a', how are you going to know which one to search for? And there's no guarantee whatsoever which encoding the author used, or if he used them consistently. Your search function is going to be unreliable at best. After all, if I was writing algebra, I'd use the ASCII 'a' not the math glyph. So will most everyone else but the most pedantic.

lifthrasiir 3y ago
> If there are 5 encodings for the glyph 'a', how are you going to know which one to search for? There are two possible cases and Unicode covers both of them. For the case of IPA `ɑ`, it is a distinct character from `a` (which doubles as an IPA) so results containing `ɑ` will be ignored. But this is not far from I want, because `a` and `ɑ` are distinct in IPA and the search correctly distinguishes them. I would have to type `ɑ` to get the other results, but this is an irrelevant matter. For the case of mathematical alphanumerics, they do normalize to normal counterparts in the compatibility mapping (i.e. NFKC or NFKD). The compatibility mapping disregards some minor differences and would be useful in this case. Of course I would like to narrow the search so that only mathematical alphanumerics match (or the inverse)---this is why Unicode defines multiple levels of comparison [1]. Assuming the default collation table, all mathematical alphanumerics are considered different from normal letters only at the level 3, while IPA `ɑ` is different at the level 1 (but sorts immediately after all `a`s). [1] https://unicode.org/reports/tr10/#Multi_Level_Comparison https://unicode.org/reports/tr10/#Multi_Level_Comparison > After all, if I was writing algebra, I'd use the ASCII 'a' not the math glyph. What I would type in TeX doesn't exactly relate to the actual encoding.