shins and sins

[Λύχνις Δαν]

Hi All,

 

  I need some help nutting this through but I believe it may be a bug. Please correct me if I'm wrong. Bear with me as the explanation is a little involved.

 

  On Mac and on Windows I am using the Ezra SIL Hebrew keyboard.

  On Mac with this keyboard active if I type in the Accordance search bar when I type the letter J I get a שׁ and when I type F I get שׂ which is as it should be.

  On windows the same test returns only the ש, the unpointed shin.

 

  Now I finally realised that this is a Unicode keyboard mapping but the search box is likely a Yehudit encoding because the texts are not yet Unicode. So I am guessing that a translation is done from Unicode code point to Yehudit encoding as one types so that the search can be done against the text.

 

  In any case I then thought about the Unicode encodings and realised that there is a combined character pair and a presentation character for each of these Hebrew letters. I wondered which was being produced on Mac and which on the PC. So I took a hex editor and on Mac I see that I am getting the so-called presentation characters :

 

  shin שׁ  code point : 0xFB2A

  sin שׂ code point : 0xFB2B

 

  but on windows I am getting the unpointed shin plus combining diacritics :

 

  unpointed shin ש  code point : 0x05E9

  sin dot    code point 0x05C2

  shin dot   code point 0x05C1

 

  And in fact I just noticed the PDF accompanying the keyboard mapping explains that this is the case.

 

  Now I cannot explain why on Mac I am seeing the presentation characters as I cannot find any doc that says that it does that but it clearly does. But that's not really the issue.

 

  My question is this, is there a problem handling combining characters on Windows ?

 

Thx

D

[Λύχνις Δαν]

Ok so I thought to try making my own Hebrew keyboard using MKLC but emit the presentation code points rather than the combining ones for shin and sin. Sure enough Accordance search box is a happy puppy. Now of course I don't have the source of the SIL keyboard though I suppose I could completely recreate it from the keyboard maps in their doc. But I would really rather not ....

 

And I have not worked out how to create a Mac keyboard to see if it handles the combining case correctly or not, so I cannot tell if this is a generic or windows specific issue.

 

BTW the same thing works in User Notes.

 

Thx

D