Bernhard Eversberg <[log in to unmask]> wrote in response to Jim
Agenbroad's clarification about the position of diacritics in USMARC:
> Which is how it is.
> And indeed, to have the non-spacing code following the letter would make
> it a "backspacing" code, wouldn't it? IMHO that is a bad idea, but it is
> the UNICODE concept, alas. Not the USMARC concept, nor ours. As yet.
The order specified by the Unicode Standard -- base character followed by
non-spacing mark(s) -- facilitates searching, matching and sorting. For
details, please see Chapter 5, "Implementation Guidelines" in "The Unicode
Standard," Version 2.0 (Addison Wesley, 1996).
The MARC order -- used in UNIMARC and national MARCs as well as USMARC --
reflects printer technology in effect when MARC (later USMARC) was
developed, i.e., no advance when a character is "non-spacing".
The Unicode order is reflective of today's computer technology. Software
to handle "composed character sequences" (base character followed by
non-spacing marks) is under development by major companies.
-- Joan Aliprand
Senior Analyst, Research Libraries Group
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