RE: The fate of Hebrew texts with Hyphen-Minus instead of Maqaf

On Sun, 24 Aug 2003 16:27:31 +0200, "Jony Rosenne" <rosennej@qsm.co.il>
said:
> For Hebrew, the Maqaf should be used.

I fully agree that the Maqaf should be used. In fact, I actually created
a customized Hebrew keymap that replaces the non-numpad Hyphen-Minus with
the Maqaf, and this is what I use when writing Hebrew, but... there are
massive amounts of *existing* texts that use Hyphen-Minus instead
(virtually all of them). What will be their fate? "are they doomed
forever to render wrongly under applications that use the Unicode BiDi
algorithm?"

> Handling the change and the conversion has not been seriously tackled in
> any major environment.

I'm working on it, but there are currently several obstacles that
complicate this campaign:
1. Badly rendered Maqaf glyphs in most common fonts (it's usually too
high). http://exego.net/forums/showMessage.asp?i=9320&qs=
2. The Maqaf and some other punctuation marks are not included in the
Israeli Keyboard Layout Standard (SI-1452). This may hopefully change,
but it takes time to convince everyone on TC-2109 that adding these marks
would be a worthwhile move. 
3. It may not be easy to educate users to accept and use the correct
Hebrew punctuation marks, instead of foreign ones. 
4. Data integrity issues have to be taken into consideration (e.g.
searching Hebrew texts for Maqaf/Minus, Geresh/Apostrophe, and
Gershaim/Quotes)

All of these points are important and once solved, would mean that the
Maqaf could be a viable solution, but the fate of existing texts is just
as important (and is the main subject of this thread).

Any suggestions?

Prog.


> 
> Jony
> 
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: www-international-request@w3.org 
> > [mailto:www-international-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of 
> > bidi@prognathous.mail-central.com
> > Sent: Wednesday, August 20, 2003 12:23 AM
> > To: www-international@w3.org
> > Subject: The fate of Hebrew texts with Hyphen-Minus instead of Maqaf
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > For the sake of the argument, let's assume that Hebrew 
> > Punctuation Maqaf is now part of the official keyboard 
> > layout; that it is implemented well (both in fonts and 
> > keymap) in all major operating systems; and that users of 
> > Hebrew accept the new addition and start to use it from then 
> > on. What will be the fate of all Hebrew texts that used 
> > Hyphen-Minus instead? are they doomed forever to render 
> > wrongly under applications that use the Unicode BiDi 
> > algorithm? by wrong, I strictly refer to the way the original 
> > authors intended them to render.
> > 
> > Further discussion about this problem can be found here: 
> > > http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=73251#c32
> > 
> > Prog.
> > 
> > 
> > 
> 
>

Received on Sunday, 24 August 2003 13:18:06 UTC