Questions about Unicode, particularly Japanese

[Nick Sabalausky]

"Matti Niemenmaa" <see_signature at for.real.address> wrote in message 
news:hum6ft$2jar$1 at digitalmars.com...
> On 2010-06-08 22:27, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> <snip>

Thanks for the helpful response :)


>
> I recommend http://rishida.net/scripts/uniview/ for searching through 
> Unicode.
>

Ahh, I'd been wanting a good Unicode equivalent to an ASCII chart. That 
seems to do nicely.


>> 6. Are there other languages with similar things for which the answers to 
>> #3
>> and #4 are different? (And if so, how does Phobos/Tango handle it?)
>
> Factor has pretty good support for Unicode:
>
> http://docs.factorcode.org/content/article-unicode.html
>

Actually, I meant other human-languages. Like, are there other combining 
characters for some language other than Japanese that are indended to be 
compared as unequal to their corresponding singe-code-point version?


>> 7. I assume Unicode doesn't have any provisions for Furigana, right? I
>> assume that would be outside the scope of Unicode, but I thought I'd ask.
>
> There's:
>
> U+FFF9  INTERLINEAR ANNOTATION ANCHOR
> U+FFFA  INTERLINEAR ANNOTATION SEPARATOR
> U+FFFB  INTERLINEAR ANNOTATION TERMINATOR
>
> But it's usually recommended to use some kind of ruby markup instead. See:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_character#Ruby_in_Unicode
>

Thanks. I was wondering about those being there but not being recommended, 
so I followed that link and the footnote, and found the following very 
helpful explanation:

http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr20/#Interlinear

Their explanation is easy to understand, but basically, they're there as a 
convenience for internal use by an application. It don't provide other 
information that would normally be important for markup, such as where to 
position it. And it's not easily displayable in plain-text-only-modes 
without the risk of subtly changing the meaning.

Any idea if "Ruby markup" has anything to do with the Ruby programming 
language? It's not clear from that Wikipedia article.