- From: Thomas Phinney <thomas.phinney@gmail.com>
- Date: Tue, 10 Feb 2009 13:18:30 -0800
- To: Mark Davis <mark.davis@icu-project.org>
- Cc: Daniel Glazman <daniel.glazman@disruptive-innovations.com>, Richard Ishida <ishida@w3.org>, Anne van Kesteren <annevk@opera.com>, Henri Sivonen <hsivonen@iki.fi>, public-i18n-core@w3.org, www-style@w3.org, Peter Edberg <pedberg@apple.com>, Deborah Goldsmith <goldsmit@apple.com>
What Daniel describes is likely the result of viewing NFD text, if the combination of viewing app, font and system-level support do not support composing that text by making the accent move onto the base letter (a.k.a. "mark attachment"). In other words, conversion to NFD can in some situations "break" the visual expression of text, and that is more likely with NFD conversion than with, say NFC. Broadly speaking, I would not suggest promoting NFD as a general-purpose recommended normalization form, for these sorts of reasons. Without knowing any details (OS version, application + version, font + format + version), it is difficult to say much more than that. (I'll note in passing that Apple has been improving their support for mark attachment at the system level, adding OpenType support in addition to their previous AAT support. I gather there were still some issues in 10.5 that may have been improved in 10.6.) Cheers, T On Tue, Feb 10, 2009 at 12:52 PM, Mark Davis <mark.davis@icu-project.org> wrote: > You appear to be mistaken. The definition of Unicode Normalization does not > depend on the platform. > > Now, what you may mean is that the implementation of Unicode Normalization > on the Mac is different than on other programs. I would be quite surprised > to hear that (cc'ing also some Apple folks who would know). > > Alternately, you could mean that the Mac uses different Unicode > Normalization than you expect, since there are 4 different forms of Unicode > Normalization (NFC, NFD, NFKC, NFKD). I believe that Apple is using NFD in > the file system internally, but don't know whether or how this is apparent > to users. The Mac also does support NFC, however, which is the preferred > form for interchange. > > Mark > > > On Tue, Feb 10, 2009 at 12:11, Daniel Glazman > <daniel.glazman@disruptive-innovations.com> wrote: >> >> Richard Ishida wrote: >>> >>> Hi Anne, >>> >>> No, this is a theoretical outcome if some browsers did start normalizing. >>> I don't know of any that do at the moment - though I haven't exactly >>> scoured the whole list of UAs at this point. >> >> >> Sorry to interrupt this discussion, I originally missed it because it >> ended up in my spam folder for some strange reason. >> >> I am using a Mac. On Mac, Unicode normalization gives me e' for >> é while most other systems will give me é. >> >> So if I start authoring on my Mac for instance a document and have >> to use a corporate stylesheet made on a PC, both instances using >> class "barré", do I take the risk of having my styles not applied ? >> If the answer is yes, it's unacceptable, even the input method or >> the OS is guilty. The user cannot have to worry about that and must >> be provided with a workable solution. A solution that chokes on acute >> e in french is not workable, even in the name of purity of the solution. >> >> </Daniel> >> >> > >
Received on Tuesday, 10 February 2009 21:19:11 UTC