VLERange: a range in between BidirectionalRange and RandomAccessRange

[Michel Fortin]

On 2011-01-14 18:02:32 -0500, foobar <foo at bar.com> said:

> Combining marks do need to be supported.
> Some languages use combining marks extensively (see my other post) and 
> of course font for those languages exist and they do support this. Mac 
> doesn't support all languages so I'm unsure if it's the best example 
> out there.
> here's an example of the Hebrew bible:
> http://www.scripture4all.org/OnlineInterlinear/Hebrew_Index.htm
> 
> Just look at the any of the PDFs there to see how Hebrew looks like 
> with all sorts of different marks.

That's a good example. Although my attempt to extract the text from the 
PDF wasn't perfect, I can confirm that the marks I got in the 
copy-pasted text are indeed combining code points, not pre-combined 
ones.

This character for instance has a combining mark: "יָ"; and it can't be 
represented by a pre-combined code point because there is no 
pre-combined form for it (or at least I couldn't find one). Some hebrew 
characters have a pre-combined form for the middle dot and some other 
marks, presumably the most common ones, but it was clearly insufficient 
for this text.


> In the same vain I could have found a Japanese text with ruby (where a 
> Kanji letter has on top of it Hiragana text that tells you how to read 
> it)

Are you sure those are combining code points? I though ruby was a 
layout feature, not something part of Unicode. And I can't find 
combining code points that would match those.


-- 
Michel Fortin
michel.fortin at michelf.com
http://michelf.com/