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

[John Hudson <tiro@xxxxxxxx>]

Andrew Cunningham wrote:

> Assuming Yoruba had all precomposed characters, and assuming Microsoft 
> created a keyboard layout for Yoruba, The Microsoft keyboard layout 
> would still use combining diacritics. It would not use precomposed 
> characters. This is a limitaton of keyboard layouts on Windows, and is 
> unlikely to change.
I know what you mean here, but the way you have stated it may be misleading. The 
limitation of Windows system keyboards is that they follow the Unicode character ordering 
model and require that combining marks always be entered after the base character.* This 
means that one will always end up with decomposed base + mark strings unless the 
application or rendering engine in the background performs mapping to precomposed 
characters, in which case you may never be sure what kind of text you are going to end up 
with from the same keyboard layout in different applications and, of course, you will 
still be reliant on normalisation for accurate searching, sorting, etc.
*Unless one is using a deadkey model, but that presumes precomposed diacritics and one 
easily ends up in the situation of having one group of users type marks before letters and 
another group of users typing them after letters. This is the situation for polytonic Greek.
John Hudson