3 ms·

> It is completely unrealistic to expect that Unicode will ever provide all the pre-composed characters that have ever been used in the past or which will ever

by arp242 3y ago

> It is completely unrealistic to expect that Unicode will ever provide all the pre-composed characters that have ever been used in the past or which will ever be desired in the future. I agree it's unlikely this will ever happen, but as far as I know there aren't really any serious technical barriers, and from purely a technical point of view it could be done if there was a desire to do so. There are plenty of rarely used codepoints in Unicode already, and while adding more is certainly an inconvenience, the status quo is also inconvenient, which is why we have one of those "wow, I just discovered Unicode normalisation!" (and variants thereof) posts on the front-page here every few months. Your last paragraph can be summarize as "it makes it easier to innovate with new diacritics". This is actually an interesting point – in the past anyone could "just" write a new character and it may or may not get any uptake, just as anyone can "just" coin a new word. I've bemoaned this inability to innovate before. That is not inherent to Unicode but computerized alphabets in general, and I that composing characters alleviates at least some of that is probably the best reason I've heard for favouring compose characters. I'm actually also okay with just using composing characters and deprecating the pre-composed forms. Overall I feel that pre-composed is probably better, partly because that's what most text currently uses and partly because it's simpler, but that's the lesser issue – the more important one that it would be nice to move towards "one obviously canonical" form that everything uses.

adrian_b 3y ago
There is also another reason that makes the composing characters very convenient right now. Many of the existing typefaces, even some that are quite expensive, do not contain all the pre-composed characters defined by Unicode, especially when those characters have been added in more recent Unicode versions or when they are used only in languages that are not Western European. The missing characters can be synthesized with composing characters. The alternatives, which are to use a font editor to add characters to the typeface or to buy another more complete and more expensive version of the typeface, are not acceptable or even possible for most users. Therefore the fact that Unicode has defined composing characters is quite useful in such cases.
- arp242 3y ago
  Every avenue opens inconveniences for someone, but I'd rather choose the relatively rare inconvenience of font designers over the relatively common inconvenience of every piece of software ever written. Especially because this can be automated in font design tools, or even font formats itself.

by arp242 3y ago

adrian_b 3y ago

There is also another reason that makes the composing characters very convenient right now. Many of the existing typefaces, even some that are quite expensive, do not contain all the pre-composed characters defined by Unicode, especially when those characters have been added in more recent Unicode versions or when they are used only in languages that are not Western European. The missing characters can be synthesized with composing characters. The alternatives, which are to use a font editor to add characters to the typeface or to buy another more complete and more expensive version of the typeface, are not acceptable or even possible for most users. Therefore the fact that Unicode has defined composing characters is quite useful in such cases.

arp242 3y ago
Every avenue opens inconveniences for someone, but I'd rather choose the relatively rare inconvenience of font designers over the relatively common inconvenience of every piece of software ever written. Especially because this can be automated in font design tools, or even font formats itself.