Collation backstory?

by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2008/08/28 03:01 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2008/08/28/8902518.aspx

Clearing out some of the mailed-to-me questions that have come in through the Contact link....

Peter O. asks:

Hi Michael,
I read your stuff ... and learn lots.
I have been wanting to learn background stuff on collations as a general subject.

Can you point me to a succinct but clear book?
Thanks.
P

I don't actually know of any good books on the subject, in fact I know lots of good books that hardly mention it at all (ref: Some sort of order to collation) despite the fact that there are some linguistic elements involved (ref: Collation can actually be linguistic).

Books don't tend to cover a lot of the stuff that I think is really cool here, linguistically -- like the stuff I mention in Traditional versus modern sorts. I have even spoken at conferences where examples like those ande like the Turkish Iİiı or the way Lithuanian sorts Y after I or what a North Korean sort would look like there could be one on Windows manged to fuel the imaginations of people attending the presentation.

At one point I was going to co-write a paper about it, I even still have the notes from a meeting we had about the research plan for the paper.I even decided to get over an older incident involving a publishing situation where a paper of mine as rejected and decided it would probably be fun. But everyone got really busy and we're all doing other stuff so we'll probably never get back to it. And though my would-have-been cowriter has the academic credentials to possibly give such a paper credibility, I don't. So I doubt I'd try to take it on myself.

But a whole book?

I'd buy if I knew of one; if I thought I had enough information for it and i was qualified and that anyone would buy it I'd probably write one.

But I don't.

And I don't.

And I'm not.

And they wouldn't.

So I won't....

Though like I said if there were such a book, I'd buy it. I have purchased numerous children's alphabet books from different languages (mainly during the time that article was being discussed but some before that even), though those probably don't count. :-)

This blog brought to you by ἀ (U+1f00, aka GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA WITH PSILI)

Ned Holbrook on 28 Aug 2008 1:52 PM:

As a general overview of collation, one could do worse than chapter 15 of "Unicode Demystified" by Richard Gillam. This blog is still probably a better source for collation anecdotes, though. :)

Anonymous on 28 Aug 2008 11:34 PM:

+1 for "Unicode Demystified". I finished reading it a few weeks ago and I feel it was a good investment.

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