Re: Unicode in strings

Anton Ertl <anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at> schrieb:

mitchalsup@aol.com (MitchAlsup1) writes:

It seems to me (in my vast ignorance) that names for things should be
written in the most appropriate set of characters in the language of
the person/thing being named.
>
Then when such a name is "sent out to be displayed" that it is a property
of the display what character set(s) it can properly emit, and thereby
alter the string of characters as appropriate to its capabilities.
>
For example:: Take > "K\u0316\u0308nig" cr type ==> K̖̈nig
When displayed on a ASCII only line printer it would be written Koenig
When displayed on a enhanced ASCII printer  it would be written König
When displayed on a full functional printer it would be written K̖̈nig

>
Why do you think that K̖̈nig should be written as Koenig or König?

On my display, this read K, n with a diacritic and something close to
a cedille under the n.

>
However, for König

Again, the diaresis is over the n, not the o.

Unicode specifies that the precomposed form is
König.  And if you want a transcription into ASCII with the knowledge
that it's German, the result would be Koenig.

This is actually sometimes a (fairly minor) problem because the
name on my passport actually reads "König" (o-diacritic), but
people without knowledge of German tend to translscribe this as
"Konig", whereas I transcribe it as "Koenig" on offical forms
such as the one I need to fill out prior to entering the US.

This is why modern EU passports have a canonical form of the
name, which then is "KOENIG".