[Biblical-languages] Diff. in Unicode handling of Gk vs. Heb?

John Baima jbaima at silvermnt.com
Fri Oct 10 10:41:15 EDT 2003


At 09:27 AM 10/10/2003 -0400, you wrote:

>1. *Why* is Hebrew handled differently in Unicode than the recommended way
>of doing Greek? That is (if I understand things correctly), the recommended
>way to do Greek is to use precomposed forms for letters with diacritics (the
>Greek Extended range), but Unicode does not provide such a range of
>precomposed characters for Hebrew, using over-striking characters instead.


This is not the way it was In The Beginning. The original Unicode proposal 
did not have any precomposed forms. The EU countries demanded that 
precomposed characters in existing ISO standards had to included otherwise 
they would not vote for it as an ISO standard (these were the Unicode vs 
ISO 10646 wars). After that, Vietnam and a few other complained to get 
their characters included. After that, the flood continued with others. If 
my memory serves, the precomposed Greek characters did not exist until 
Unicode 2.0 or 2.1.

It is simply impractical to enumerate all of the productive combinations 
for Hebrew. Yikes!


_________
John Baima
Silver Mountain Software 1029 Tanglewood Dr, Cedar Hill TX 75104-3019
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