> > A. LilyPond actually _does_ support the Latin1 character set, as
> > Latin1 and Unicode coincide on the first 256 codepoints.
>
> I don't quite see that. If I put an e-acute (a byte of decimal
> value #233) in a LilyPond file, it is skipped -- it does not appear
> in the PDF output. I have to put in the unicode equivalent, which
> is the two bytes #195 #169 (where 169 = 233 - 64) in order for
> LilyPond to give me an e-acute. USASCII and unicode coincide on the
> first 128 codepoints, but from what I can see, Latin1 and unicode do
> not correspond on byte values #128 to #255.
You are mixing up Unicode with one of its possible representations,
UTF-8. A Unicode character is a number between 0x0 and 0x10FFFF;
UTF-8 represents such code points as multi-byte sequences of varying
length, where the range 0x00-0x7F is identical to ASCII.
> Well, I have to admit it's hard to argue with that. Despite the
> fact that I think that a lot of North Americans would like to have
> the direct Latin1 availability to which they have become accustomed,
> I know that at the least, Eastern Europeans would also want Latin2
> and Latin4.
Today, Windows uses Unicode exclusively -- even in North America. You
won't have big success with latin1 files.
> Unicode only provides a way of specifying character codes for a wide
> variety of symbols in the interior of a text file. But without font
> files containing the order of 64K symbols, the current fragmented
> font-file situation will continue to limit what can easily be output
> to a screen or a printer.
This is a very naïve view how Unicode works. Having a font with 64K
glyphs is useless in most situations, given that Unicode represents
characters, not glyphs.
> > C. Unicode, not Latin1, is the future.
>
> Maybe, but not in my lifetime.
Well, it is straightforward to use a converter like `iconv' within a
script which automatically transforms your latin1 file into UTF-8.
Werner
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