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Re: Proposed change to greek-ibycus4 input-method


From: David Kastrup
Subject: Re: Proposed change to greek-ibycus4 input-method
Date: Tue, 11 Jul 2006 23:29:14 +0200
User-agent: Gnus/5.11 (Gnus v5.11) Emacs/22.0.50 (gnu/linux)

Peter Heslin <address@hidden> writes:

> I would like to propose a change in the way the greek-ibycus4
> input-method for ancient Greek handles capital letters with iota
> subscript (ypogegrammeni), as a result of having been bitten by its (to
> me) very surprising behavior.
>
> Currently, when you type a capital letter followed by a normal iota, the
> input method arbitrarily decides that this must actually be a subscript
> iota.  But in the vast majority of cases, this is not what the user
> intends at all -- he or she wants a normal iota after the capital
> letter.
>
> The reason for this ambiguity is that the ibycus4 encoding for LaTeX
> does not actually support subscript iotas under capital letters (it
> expects you to write them adscript, as if they were normal iotas).  So
> there is no pre-existing standard to appeal to, but it seems logical to
> use the | character after the vowel, just as for lower case vowels.
>
> In other words, with the current code:
>
>     )Ai => ᾈ 
>
> which has two problems: (1) it is very surprising, and (2) there is no
> straight-forward way to type the common sequence of Greek characters
> Ἀι

I think there is a bit of code point vs reprentation problem here,
too.  I think that ᾈ is actually the same `character' as Ἀι or even Αι
(though Αι would also be short for Ἁι, like in ἐν Ἁιδõυ, and so needs
a different code point just in case someone wants to use a font with
spirited capitals), only with a different writing convention.  I would
think it likely that you'll never encounter both ᾈ as well as Ἀι in
the same text, but you might find consistently either one or the other
(or the third) everywhere, depending on the printer's taste.

This is in contrast to Αἰ or Ἀϊ which are actually different character
combinations.

> ‐‐ you have to separate the vowels with a space and then go back and
> delete the space between them.
>
> With my proposal:
>
>     )A| => ᾈ 
>     )Ai => Ἀι
>
> Now there is an easy way to type both sequences and the default behavior
> is much less surprising.  It's also consistent with the behavior of the
> greek-babel input-method.  Patch attached.

I think your idea sounds reasonable.  I just have no clue whether
the Ibycus rules would actually suggest one or the other.

For convenient typing in Emacs, your suggestion is likely the best and
most intuitive way, anyhow.  But if we want to convert "input just
like a quail method" into Unicode, like recently discussed on this
list, it might start making a difference.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum




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