From tut@eng.sun.com Fri Apr  5 22:50:24 1991
Received: from Sun.COM by dkuug.dk via EUnet with SMTP (5.64+/8+bit/IDA-1.2.8)
	id AA28119; Fri, 5 Apr 91 22:50:24 +0200
Received: from Eng.Sun.COM (zigzag-bb.Corp.Sun.COM) by Sun.COM (4.1/SMI-4.1)
	id AA18553; Fri, 5 Apr 91 12:49:49 PST
Received: from cairo.Eng.Sun.COM by Eng.Sun.COM (4.1/SMI-4.1)
	id AA28582; Fri, 5 Apr 91 12:49:47 PST
Received: by cairo.Eng.Sun.COM (4.1/SMI-4.1)
	id AA11684; Fri, 5 Apr 91 12:48:37 PST
Date: Fri, 5 Apr 91 12:48:37 PST
From: tut@eng.sun.com (Bill "Bill" Tuthill)
Message-Id: <9104052048.AA11684@cairo.Eng.Sun.COM>
To: erik@sra.co.jp, unicode@Sun.COM, wg15rin@dkuug.dk
Subject: Re: shortcomings in XPG locale (was Sort sequence)
X-Charset: ASCII
X-Char-Esc: 29

> > 1. There is no LC_BIDI database to store direction information.
> > 	Did X/Open ever think about Hebrew and Arabic?
> 
> While we're at it, we might as well consider vertical printing, as is
> sometimes used in Japan. So maybe we should call it LC_DIRECTION, or
> LC_TEXTDIRECTION, or maybe just include it in LC_CTYPE?

Yes, LC_DIRECTION sounds like a good name.  And perhaps text direction
really is related to character type.

> > 2. Input methods for disambiguating Japanese, Korean etc. are not
> > 	codified in any LC_INPUT file.

I'm talking about typing in Hiragana and having the system convert to
Kanji when necessary, giving you a menu of possible choices when the
choice of Kanji character is ambiguous.  Maybe this is so complicated
that it must be handled by software input modules.

> > 3. LC_FONT (or whatever) for supporting extended character sets
> > 	and typography is missing.

If I switched to ISO-Arabic or ISO-Cyrillic, where would my fonts
come from?  Is this another thing to throw in LC_CTYPE?

> > 4. For Indic languages (and any heavily composed script), there
> > 	is no LC_COMPOSE database.

There are examples in Indic scripts where characters appear in input
several positions after their actual physical location.  Depending
on intervening characters, the shape of a base character can change.
Should this kind of thing be encoded in LC_CTYPE as well?

Bill