Proceedings EuroTEX2005 – Pont-à-Mousson, France MOT02 Omega Becomes a Sign Processor Yannis Haralambous ENST Bretagne
[email protected] http://omega.enstb.org/yannis G´abor Bella ENST Bretagne
[email protected] Characters and Glyphs not one but four equivalence classes of shapes: ara- bic initial letter jeem, arabic medial letter The distinction between “characters” and “glyphs” jeem, and so on. But are these “characters”? is a rather new issue in computing, although the Answering to this question requires a pragmatic problem is as old as humanity: our species turns out approach. What difference will it make if we have to be a writing one because, amongst other things, one or rather four characters for letter jeem? There our brain is able to interpret images as symbols be- will indeed be a difference in operations such as longing to a given writing system. Computers deal searching, indexing, etc. A good question to ask with text in a more abstract way. When we agree is: “when I’m searching in an Arabic document, am that, in computing, all possible “capital A” letters I looking for specific forms of letters?” Most of the are represented by the number 65, then we cut short time, the answer is negative.1 Form-independent all information on how a given instance of capital let- searching will, most of the times, produce better re- ter A is drawn. Modern computing jargon describes sults and this implies that having a single character this process as “going from glyphs to characters.” 2 for all forms is probably a better choice.