Still struggling with Unicode

[Graham Samuel]

Thanks for the swift response, Richmond? Are you in Bulgaria?

I kind of understand what you mean. But using your example, if someone had an Anglo-Saxon word processor, and chose to italicise 'thorn' (if that is meaningful!), and then pasted a string containing this from the word processor to an LC program, would it have to be recognised by the program separately from the 'plain text' version of 'thorn' or what? It seems to me that if Unicode actually includes styling information (italic, bold, different colours???) we are all doomed!

TIA

Graham

On 30 Aug 2014, at 18:44, Richmond <richmondmathewson at gmail.com> wrote:

> 
> On 30.08.2014 19:29, Graham Samuel wrote:
>> I know people are lining up for the conference (wish I was there!) so I am not sure who's listening, but here goes.
>> 
>> On advice from Fraser Gordon, I've been trying to use LC 7 to experiment with Unicode. I've had some tricky problems with the latest version in the LC 'downloads' catalogue (DP10), so I'm having to work somewhat in the abstract (I mean I can't get my actual app script to run, so I'm just using the Message Box).
>> 
>> I have been looking on the internet at various representations of Unicode characters (OK, codepoints). It seems that there are some forms that include formatting information and some that don't. For example, choosing that old chestnut, Greek letter lower case pi, a search appears to reveal:
>> 
>> U+1D70B seems to represent it in italic (written in LC as 0x1D70B)
>> U+1D7B9 in sans-serif bold (written in LC as 0x1D7B9)
>> 
>> but
>> 
>> U+0x3C0 appears to be pi with the formatting ignored,
>> 
>> and finally I swear that some PDF I downloaded from the Unicode Consortium gave
>> 
>> U+1D77F as a legitimate representation of pi - (written 0x1D77F)
>> 
>> Sure enough, in the LC 7 message box, ALL these generate a pi glyph.
>> 
>> Can anyone explain what this means, and what I should do if someone pastes a Unicode string containing pi into my app - I mean how should I recognise it? Can I strip off the style info, and if so what is the rule for doing that?
>> 
>> If this happens for a little old symbol that we've all been using since childhood, what chance to we have with more exotic stuff?
>> 
>> Puzzled
>> 
>> Graham
>> 
> 
> The Unicode standard organises glyphs into writing-system families.
> 
> So; thinking on the fly about pi I would expect it to be in:
> 
> 1. Greek script.
> 
> 2. Coptic script.  and
> 
> 3. Mathematical signs. To say the least.
> 
> MY recommendation is to go here: http://www.unicode.org/charts/
> 
> and find the chart that has a Pi at the lowest Unicode address.
> 
> Just recently I fell into a hole by using an Anglo-Saxon 'thorn' from the "wrong place";
> by "wrong place" I mean that the character range the thorn I chose was not included
> in the standard fonts issued with operating systems.
> 
> Richmond.
> 
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