[cgreek:00129] Re: unicode glyphs

[Naoto Takahashi <ntakahas@xxxxxxxx>]

To tell the truth, I do not like Unicode.  I really hate their
unification policy for Chinese-Japanese-Korean characters.

>>>>> Pierre MacKay <mackay@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

> Unfortunately, the fact that something exists in Unicode
> does not mean that it refers to a real phenomenon encountered
> by a scholar in ancient Greek.  First off, Unicode officially
> disclaims any interest in historical orthography (they do not
> call them "dead" languages, but that is what they mean).  

That is true.  Even Version 3.0 does not include Glagolitic.

> Sorry to go on so long, but I do find the notion of
> allowing Unicode, a system for modern commercial
> text processing, to govern the sell established practices
> of classical scholarship more than a bit bizarre, especially
> when Unicode specifically excludes any interest in dead
> languages.

Even if Emacs uses Unicode for its internal representation, you can
still use letters that are not included in Unicode.  We can provide a
private character set for missing letters.  Emacs can and does use
multiple character sets simultaneously.  There is no problem
intermixing multiple character sets in a file.

Emacs-20.7, the current official version of GNU Emacs, does not
support Unicode at all, but Emacs-21 will support a portion of Unicode
(from U+0000 to U+24FF).  All Greek characters in Unicode, both modern
and clasical, are included in the range.  So, technically there is no
need to have another character set for letters that are already there.
Besides, an almost-Unicode-based approach should facilitate
communication between Emacs and other programs, for example, Heslin's
wonderful Diogenes.

We are now using WinGreek's character set for Emacs' internal
representation.  I thought Unicode is better than WinGreek's character
set for internal representation, so I am planning to go that way.  If
there are advantages to keep WinGreek-based approach, I would like to
hear.  Or, if you think some other character set suits better for
internal representation, please let me know.

-- 
TAKAHASHI Naoto
ntakahas@xxxxxxxx
http://m17n.org/ntakahas/