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Re: New accent modifier types?

Brian McMahon wrote:
>> When I first looked into accents, I thought the Latin1 and Latin2
>> character groups should be sufficient, but Latin3 and Latin4 are needed
>> to include some characters accents like over-bar.
> 
> Again, the existing markup has been adequate for the requirements of
> Acta C (and E) for 15 years, but it won't cover all conceivable
> possibilities. (The greatest need for accented characters is
> in authors' names; and, as an international journal, we need to
> accommodate authors from anywhere in the world, including Iceland.)
> 
> However, the more feature creep you allow (in terms of accommodating
> possible markup), the greater the overhead. TeX, for example, seems
> the natural choice for math markup; but even so, many math symbols
> aren't defined in vanilla TeX, and one needs to be able to support
> TeX extension packages - and to support them in a portable and
> archival way. HTML and XML approaches can be followed, but also
> require support of DTDs, schemas, entity tables etc. Unicode
> offers a very large library of glyphs, but even that won't cover
> all requirements. Sure, there are mechanisms for extending Unicode,
> but they also require support and systematisation.
> 
> How far down this road should CIF go? At this stage, I wouldn't
> care to commit myself. I will say, though, that the discussion
> so far is encouraging, in that it begins to offer a clean way
> (through MIME types and associated external delegates or handlers)
> to support existing standard mechanisms for text processing
> that should sit nicely alongside the image-handling mechanisms
> of imgCIF.

In terms of simple CIF markup, I think that a few extra accent types are
OK, but the the basic syntax should be simple. That is why I ignores
Cyrillic, Arabic, etc., because they are just too different from plain
ASCII.

In fact, my hope is to actually simplify the syntax by converting the
ones with no backslash to a more uniform format. I think it is also a
good idea to stop using the <B> and <I> html tags. Of course, having a
means to do proper HTML as an alternative makes this more reasonable.

Joe

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