Unicode normalisation [was Re: [beginner] What's wrong?]

[Peter Pearson]

On Fri, 08 Apr 2016 16:00:10 +1000, Steven D'Aprano <steve at pearwood.info> wrote:
> On Fri, 8 Apr 2016 02:51 am, Peter Pearson wrote:
>> 
>> The Unicode consortium was certifiably insane when it went into the
>> typesetting business.
>
> They are not, and never have been, in the typesetting business. Perhaps
> characters are not the only things easily confused *wink*

Defining codepoints that deal with appearance but not with meaning is
going into the typesetting business.  Examples: ligatures, and spaces of
varying widths with specific typesetting properties like being non-breaking.

Typesetting done in MS Word using such Unicode codepoints will never
be more than a goofy approximation to real typesetting (e.g., TeX), but
it will cost a huge amount of everybody's time, with the current discussion
of ligatures in variable names being just a straw in the wind.  Getting
all the world's writing systems into a single, coherent standard was
an extraordinarily ambitious, monumental undertaking, and I'm baffled
that the urge to broaden its scope in this irrelevant direction was
entertained at all.

(Should this have been in cranky-geezer font?)

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