Marco,

> I notice that the draft document does not show any code numbers.

How is the

> character set encoded exactly, in terms of bytes?

Encoding is beyond the scope of the effort. Actually I was
surprised to find that the draft indicated that the table was to
present a sort order as well. The thrust of the effort is to
establish the Ethiopic repetoire of characters, for which there has
never been a consensus for. One must first know what it is you are
going to encode before encoding it ;)

Honestly I don't expect QSAE will propose a new encoding scheme,
just the repetoire of elements that should be available to Ethiopic
software, irregardless of the encoding.

>
> I am also curios about a character which is shown on page 4, in

the cell

> below digit "9": it looks like an upside down exclamation point.

What is it

> used for in Ethiopic.

"Timherte Slaq", the consenus is that it does not have to be
rendered differently from an inverted question mark. The use in
Ethiopia and Eritrea (I forget the Tigrigna name, "Slaq Timherti"
maybe) is to indicate sarcasm, that an unreal statement has been
made. Helpful for children who aren't used to double meanings and
reading between the lines. Sometimes used in poetry, mostly easily
found in political cartoons.

>
> Finally, the only remark that I would do is that it does not seem

a good

> idea that digit "0" comes after digit "9", rather than before

digit "1".

>

I'll forward the comment. I don't know the rationale here nor for
the punctuation. I've asked that some explanation for the ordering
be offered in the draft since they've gone ahead and addressed the
issue.

cheers,

/Daniel