Name: bb33257 Date: 02/24/98


The current RuleBasedCollator doesn't work well with Thai and Lao.
Both of these languages' character blocks in the Unicode standard
include vowel signs that are stored in VISUAL order rather than
LOGICAL order (this breaks the normal Unicode semantics, but the
committee did it this way to be consistent with existing encoding
standards for these languages). However, words in these
languages are still sorted as if the characters were stored in
logical order. Accommodating this using the current collation
design requires a very large set of rules, one for each vowel-
consonant combination. We need a mechanism--either in
RuleBasedCollator or in a new subclass of Collator--to allow
certain characters to be handled out of order.
======================================================================