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

> -----Original Message-----
> From: www-international-request@w3.org 
> [mailto:www-international-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of 
> bidi@prognathous.mail-central.com
> Sent: Wednesday, September 17, 2003 9:59 AM
> To: Mark Davis; www-international@w3.org
> Subject: Re: The fate of Hebrew texts with Hyphen-Minus 
> instead of Maqaf
> 
> 
> 
> On Tue, 16 Sep 2003 15:14:59 -0700, "Mark Davis" 
> <mark.davis@jtcsv.com>
> said:
> > The bidi algorithm was designed in full knowledge that it 
> would not be 
> > able to handle all ordering cases,
> 
> Right now the algorithm doesn't provide an acceptable 
> solution for Hebrew users, as it breaks the rendering of most 
> existing texts.

These existing texts are the result of a bug in Microsoft software.
Microsoft had asked the UTC to change the classification of Hyphen-Minus
according to their implementation, and the request was not accepted. 

> 
> > because there is often not enough information in the text 
> to provide 
> > for the right ordering,
> 
> Real life implementations show that there is more than enough 
> information to define a strict set of rules on how to deal with
> HebrewLetter+HyphenMinus+Number sequences, without facing any false
> positives.
> 
> To the best of my knowledge, there are no cases in the Hebrew 
> language where a negative number is preceded by Hebrew letter 
> without another HyphenMinus/Maqaf in between ("-20ýä"). Since 
> there's no ambiguity here, it should be very much possible to 
> revise the algorithm so that it deals with such sequences.

So there should be no problem for a text processor to get it right and
produce the correct Unicode data stream.

> 
> > or there are inconsistencies between different usage patterns,
> 
> Which usage patterns exactly? I can't think of one that this revision 
> will break.

I did not see any proposed revision, I only saw a description of the
problem.

...

> 
> Prog.
> 
>

Received on Wednesday, 17 September 2003 13:49:08 UTC