Re: [A12n-Collab] Re: [africa] 5 categories of African orthographies (Latin)

[John Hudson <tiro@xxxxxxxx>]

Denis Jacquerye wrote:

> It's rather disappointing and discouraging to see companies with i18n
> teams doing great work but totally failing in that aspect. Category 4
> orthographies (with composed characters) face numerous basic issues
> Category 3 or 2 orthographies don't, not only at input and display but
> also at the data handling level. There really needs to be a greater
> awareness for the need of normalization.
I agree completely. It is a weak area of internationalisation: strangely, since string 
comparison is such an everyday task for computer programmers, so you would think that 
normalisation would be something of which they would be quick to understand the importance.
But as I noted -- and as people calling for more precomposed characters need to understand 
-- normalisation is an issue whenever there is more than one way to arrive at the same 
typeform, so precomposed characters do not solve the problem and in some instances may 
complicate it further.
John Hudson