--- Karl Ove Hufthammer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Andrew Dunbar <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in > [EMAIL PROTECTED]:">news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]: > > > *May* map to a different glyph - but glyph is not > the > > correct term, I believe. You could have a c with > an > > acute accent and a cedilla, for instance, which > would > > need three codepoints but appear on the screen to > be > > one character. I don't have the proper definition > for > > glyph handy sorry. > > Neither do I, but I can try: A glyph is a graphical > presentation > form. I Unicode, there is neither not a one to one > mapping from > characters to glyphs, or the other way. One > character can displayed > as several glyphs and one glyph can be displayed as > several > characters. E.g. the greek letter pi and the > mathematical symbol > (usually) use the same glyph (graphical > presentation), but they're > different character. Sometimes a character is > displayed in > different ways depending on which language it is > used in (e.g. > Japanese vs. Chinese). > > But we also have combining characters in Unicode. > For example, to > write a �, you write and e, followed by a combining > �. This may be > rendered as an e with � superimposed (usually looks > bad), but > usually a separate � glyph is used. Note that both, > �, e and the > combining � characters are defined in Unicode. This > is mainly for > backwards compatibility with older character sets > (e.g. ISO-8859- > 1). Future characters will likely not feature any > new pre-composed > characters.
This is a major point, and why we *have to* worry about combining characters now. > Lastly, none of this has anything to do with > surrogate characters, > which completely matters even more! :) Well surrogate characters are only an issue when using UTF-16 (some UCS-2 implementations are really UTF-16). So as long as our iconv can handle it and we always convert to/from UTF-16 using iconv, there's nothing to worry about here. If we continue to use UCS-2 like we do now, then we really have to worry about it. Andrew Dunbar. > -- > Karl Ove Hufthammer ===== http://linguaphile.sourceforge.net http://www.abisource.com __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Everything you'll ever need on one web page from News and Sport to Email and Music Charts http://uk.my.yahoo.com
