Re: "Decorative diacritics" (Was: Re: "Kodak" )

Nicholas wrote:

> One thing I consider blatantly dumb is adding diacritical marks (correct term? Sorry; should know) for their decorative apearance,

About fifteen years ago, one of the banks in Georgia changed their
name. The new name included two or three diacritic marks. One of the
top executives publicly stated that the new name was dumb, and nobody
could pronounce it correctly anyway. A few months later that bank
changed its name to something that people could pronounce.

> I do note that the Opera browser added handling of Cyrillic, then Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, ...offering BiDi and Arabic shaping and joining,

Probably chosen because of ease of implementation, not economics.

>does not render SE Asian and Indic scripts correctly, afaik.

Those are the hardest to correctly implement.

> Wonder whether there will ever be a text editor to handle top-down languages...

OpenOffice.org, though it is a kludge.

Boustrophedon languages can be written, though it is a kludge. Bottom
to top is "difficult", but possible with a kludge.

xan

jonathon
--
Monolingualism is a curable disease.
Carlos Fuentes