> The Fraktur thread is interesting indeed, as that is the key of the problem:
> some people want to be able to have an English/Gaelic/German plain text
> with English portions in Arial, Gaelic in some celtic-style font, and German
> in Fraktur.
>
> My opinion is that those fonts or font-style specifications don't belong
> in plain text.
>
> I also think that it is not always a good idea to do that (A text in
> Arial/Uncial/Fraktur intermixed will be very ugly, imho), so it should
> not be done by default.
I don't know. If the embedded text is in Hebrew or Greek you don't mind?
Foreign words and short phrases are commonly set in italics.
Without that, the text can become very confusing, especially
when these foreign words also exist in the local language.
("kind" is 'cheek' when reading Danish, 'child' when reading Dutch,
'friendly' when reading English)
Thus, the meaning of a passage can depend on the fonts used.
For mathematicians this is very familiar: symbols in different
fonts denote completely different things.
Whether font-style specifications belong in plain text or not
might be a matter of definition. For example, plain text might
be defined as text without font or other markup.
Andries
--
Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels
Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
