On Mon, Nov 12, 2001 at 05:29:57PM -0800, Brian Stell wrote: > What is the point of an app using Unicode if the app only > supports fonts for European scripts? Why not just use iso8859-1 > or cp1252?
Because I need Esperanto and Icelandic and Old German characters, but not Japanese/Indic/Chinese. Duh. Pretty much no character outside MES-3 has any meaning to me. Whether a Chinese ideogram or a question mark appears doesn't matter to me. It matters less to my father, my sister or my grandfather. > What sho?ld hap?en if the un?code da?a has a c?de po?nt not > in the f?nt? A bla?k or a ques?ion-ma?k? Ve?y unplea?ant f?r > the rea?er. Um, all those characters replaced with question marks are in ASCII. Come up with an English example with the question marks replacing characters from outside MES-3 that would actually make more sense to a native English speaker if the question marks were replaced by characters. (You may replace English with any other language completely covered by MES-3, if you want.) > Apps benefit when the system makes support for multingual > (input/output/fonts) easy for all languages. I don't see this obsession with multilingual fonts. Few enough net fonts cover ASCII, though a handful claim a full international character set (i.e. CP1252.) Fonts with minimal coverage are a fact of life. Deal. > Half solutions may help in the western world but I can > certainly see why people outside the western world are > concerned about Unicode when one hears half solutions > like these. So instead of half solutions, many ten percent solutions or one percent solutions are advocated. Right. Full Unicode solutions are not easy, and in some cases not possible. Terminal emulators are limited in capability, and screen sizes are limited. If it annoys you that a 12 pixel font only covers MES-3, you're welcome to draw the others; but many scripts just don't scale to 12 pixels. If you need a script that can't be handled by a font size, pick a bigger font size. If a font just doesn't cover your characters, you're welcome to draw in the rest, but there's only limited time in the day, and if the font creator decided he wasn't capable or interested in drawing a character, that's his choice. A MES-3 solution handles "German and English Sounds", "The Esperanto Teacher", "Old High German" and the rest of the stuff I work on, hence I prefer it to an ISO-8859-1 solution. Maybe it's a half solution; but a half solution covers a whole lot more problems than a ten percent solution. A 100 percent solution won't be here until at least Buhid and Shavian are part of Unicode; need we wait until then to start building Unicode tools? -- David Starner - [EMAIL PROTECTED] Pointless website: http://dvdeug.dhis.org "I saw a daemon stare into my face, and an angel touch my breast; each one softly calls my name . . . the daemon scares me less." - "Disciple", Stuart Davis -- Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
