Apostrophes in non-ASCII names (was: A proposed solution for descriptions)

Doug Ewell dewell at adelphia.net
Tue Jun 27 21:52:37 CEST 2006


Ciarán Ó Duibhín <ciaran at oduibhin dot freeserve dot co dot uk> wrote:

> I will risk further sickening those who are tired of this topic by 
> responding to recent posts which refer to one of mine.  In doing so, I 
> am not challenging the consensus which clearly exists on the list on 
> the encoding of apostrophes, and which is embodied in Doug's latest 
> proposals.

I'm under the impression there is no consensus, and I've gone ahead and 
submitted the Amis proposal and left the others on the dock.  When the 
various factions are ready to find some common ground about apostrophes, 
then we can start thinking about reintroducing proposals.

> Actually, U+2018 and U+2019 can be keyed directly, using free input 
> method layouts. This is a safe way to do it, and works system-wide, 
> under any application.

Most users, at least in the U.S. (and not the type who frequents a list 
like this one or Unicode), have no IME and no idea how to type 
directional quotes on a system-wide basis.  Microsoft's 
"US-International" keyboard has keys for them, but most people I know do 
not use it.

> I am not arguing against typographical accuracy — why on earth would 
> I?  I am arguing against achieving typographical accuracy at the 
> expense of encoding accuracy, which would be a kludge.  We need to 
> find ways of achieving both kinds of accuracy together.

But wait, there's more.

It is unfortunate but true that many people do not use fonts that 
contain glyph mappings for U+02BB and U+02BC (they're not in most of 
Microsoft's "core fonts" for Windows XP, Lucida Sans Unicode being an 
exception) and have no way to type them into a search box.  I still 
believe it needs to be possible for these people to view and search for 
N’Ko or Gwichʼin in the Registry.  That means usability, which is an 
important feature alongside accuracy, and it means ASCII fallbacks. 
This is the place where we have no consensus.

--
Doug Ewell
Fullerton, California, USA
http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/ 




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