Re: SC UniPad 0.99 released.
On Tue, 27 Aug 2002, Torsten Mohrin wrote: Thank you for your detailed response. > Jungshik Shin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > >> http://www.unipad.org > >disappointed. At first, I was intrigued by their claim that it > >supports Hangul Jamos. I've seen some false claims that Hangul > >claim. It just treats them as 'spacing characters' instead of combining > means. We will explain this more precisely. However, displaying Jamo > as separated characters is actually a certain level of support, while > non-support would be to display hollow boxes. Therefore the Jamo > support in UniPad is on a very basic level currently. But at least you > can see something. All right. I guess we just have to agree to disagree :-) as to what 'support' of a certain script means for a text editor. More on this below > 2. Please keep in mind that software improves gradually. This is > version 0.99/1.0. Better support of certain scripts will be realised > in future versions. This is planned for Indic scripts and also for > Hangul. Good to hear that. I'll certainly looking forward to future versions. > 3. If your definition of "support" is that strict, than I doubt that > you will be able to find any software that can claim to support > Unicode at all. There must have been some misunderstanding here. Unicode support can mean many different things to many different people, but I NEVER wrote that SC Unipad does NOT support Unicode. I believe it DOES support Unicode very well in some aspects and not so well in other aspects. I never thought/wrote that supporting Unicode means supporting all the characters/ letters encoded and all the scripts representable in Unicode as expected by native users of those scripts in a single stroke. I think a product can claim "Unicode support" without supporting many of scripts included in Unicode. There was a thread on this topic sometime ago on this list and Unicode FAQ may have an entry on the issue. Simply put, I did NOT blame SC Unipad for not supporting (in my view) South and Southeast Asian scripts and Hangul Jamos (for pre-1933 orthography Korean support and perhaps for 'future' Korean support). What I questioned was whether it's acceptable/wise to say an *editor* supports South and Southeast Asian scripts and Hangul Jamos _without_ any qualification when all it does is just to treat characters/letters comprising those scripts as spacing characters/letters and render them serially when they have to reordered, combined and otherwise processed through some complex rendering. To me, the answer is clear. It's too misleading to put 'yes' next to all those languages for which proper rendering is not provided at least for 'non-i18n engineer users' (see below). On this point, I guess we now all agree and I'm expecting you to have more refined classification of support levels in your list. > Okay, okay :) We will define "support" more precisely. Thank you for this. As suggested by Marco, it'd be very nice if you could have more fine-grained levels of support (than simple 'yes vs no') marked in the list of languages supported. > 4. You have the chance to evaluate the software, as you did. You are > free to decide not to use UniPad. I feel sorry, if it does not meet > your requirements. But I wouldn't say that it is useless. This depends > on your needs. For example, a hex editor is useless for the purpose of > writing a 200 page essay, sureley. Nevertheless, a hex editor is > without doubt a very useful tool. Please!! I never wrote that SC Unipad is useless. I'm sorry if you got that impression from what I wrote. I just wrote that it's useless for Hangul Jamo and SE and S. Asian scripts. Even for that, it can be useful as others and you wrote(,which I admit I didn't realize when writing my first message on the topic.). Here I should have made it clear that I was writing from a point of view of average 'non-i18n engineer' users. As James, Marco, Doug and you wrote, sometimes it's handy to have all complex script processing removed and be able to work with hexadecimal numbers(like Carl Brown's missing glyph representation) or sequence of clearly distinguishable _spacing_ glyphs for all characters. For sure, I have a definite need for that. > >Again, it does not. It treats combining characters as spacing characters. > >I don't think users of those scripts would regard SC Unipad as supporting > >their scripts/languages. > > You are right. I wouldn't write a letter to somebody in German where > the diaresis of an umlaut is displayed on the right side of the base > character. If I want to write a letter there are many word processors > out there which I can use. However, if I have (for instance) the need > to distinguish between 'u with diaresis' and 'u with double acute' I > may need an editor that is able to display those characters separated > and unambiguously. It's your decision whether you need such editor or > a word processor or some other Unicode edit
Re: SC UniPad 0.99 released.
Jungshik Shin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> http://www.unipad.org > > On several occasions, I heard about it on this mailing list and finally >my curiosity drove me to try it. Unfortunately, I was mightly >disappointed. At first, I was intrigued by their claim that it >supports Hangul Jamos. I've seen some false claims that Hangul >Jamos is supported and wanted to see if it really support them. Well, >it does not do any better than most other fonts/software that made that >claim. It just treats them as 'spacing characters' instead of combining >characters. Basically, it's useless except for making Unicode code chart >(so is Arial MS Unicode.) Well... :) 1. I confess that it has to be made clearer, what "support" actually means. We will explain this more precisely. However, displaying Jamo as separated characters is actually a certain level of support, while non-support would be to display hollow boxes. Therefore the Jamo support in UniPad is on a very basic level currently. But at least you can see something. 2. Please keep in mind that software improves gradually. This is version 0.99/1.0. Better support of certain scripts will be realised in future versions. This is planned for Indic scripts and also for Hangul. 3. If your definition of "support" is that strict, than I doubt that you will be able to find any software that can claim to support Unicode at all. 4. You have the chance to evaluate the software, as you did. You are free to decide not to use UniPad. I feel sorry, if it does not meet your requirements. But I wouldn't say that it is useless. This depends on your needs. For example, a hex editor is useless for the purpose of writing a 200 page essay, sureley. Nevertheless, a hex editor is without doubt a very useful tool. >Then, I found its claim that it supports 300 languages(scripts). Wow ! >Does it properly support various South and Southeast Asian scripts? Okay, okay :) We will define "support" more precisely. >Again, it does not. It treats combining characters as spacing characters. >I don't think users of those scripts would regard SC Unipad as supporting >their scripts/languages. You are right. I wouldn't write a letter to somebody in German where the diaresis of an umlaut is displayed on the right side of the base character. If I want to write a letter there are many word processors out there which I can use. However, if I have (for instance) the need to distinguish between 'u with diaresis' and 'u with double acute' I may need an editor that is able to display those characters separated and unambiguously. It's your decision whether you need such editor or a word processor or some other Unicode editor. I invite everybody to evaluate UniPad. If it's useful for your work, fine. If not, please consider to re-evaluate it in a couple of month. Maybe version 1.1 will provide what you need. With best regards -- Torsten Mohrin, UniPad Team Sharmahd Computing http://www.unipad.org
RE: SC UniPad 0.99 released.
Jungshik Shin wrote: > IMHO, their use of 'support' (for Hangul Jamo and various > S&SE Asian scripts) goes beyond the flexibility limit I perceive the > word to have. [...] I agree: in their list of supported languages, many "yes"'s should by "partially" or "yes but...". However, I think that UniPad remains a very nice piece of software, and I am confident that they will finally reach full support of all scripts. But consider that it is a low-priority job, because it gives no income to the company producing it, so allow them to take their time. Currently, I see UniPad as a sort of "debugging editor", i.e. a tools for inspecting the details of the encoding without the "obfuscation" of complex-script display transformations. I hope that this "low level view" will remain as an option even when full complex scripts will be implemented. When programming, it is sometimes useful to have the possibility of temporarily disabling all the complexity of Unicode display (bidirectionality, combining glyphs, ligatures, format controls, etc.), and be able to interact with the crude code points. > > UniPad does include glyphs for individual jamos as > > well as precomposed Hangul syllables, which is more than most > > non-Korean-specific TrueType fonts can offer. > > Which is still far from supporting Hangul Jamos. This is true. But they also claim that they support "Conversion to Precomposed Characters" (see http://www.unipad.org/techinfo/features/sub_general.html). If this is correctly implemented also for Hangul syllables, one could see it as a very rudimentary support of modern Korean. OK still quite far from the real thing, anyway. By the way, I never saw a proper johab system in action, and I cannot figure out how certain details are supposed to work. For instance, what should the combining jamos look like while they are being typed? - E.g., imagine I am writing <-r> : what should the initial look like while I haven't yet entered the vowel? - And what happens when I add vowel : does it immediately form syllable or does it wait to see if a trailing consonant follows? I also wonder whether and how it is possible to edit the components of a completed syllable. - Can I go on syllable and overtype the with another consonant? - Can I delete the leaving a stand-alone vowel? And, in this case, what does the look like: is the consonant's slot left empty, or is it filled by some sort placeholder? - And what does the cursor look like during these operations? - Does the cursor highlight the proper parts of the syllable, or is the syllable temporarily converted into a series of spacing glyphs? _ Marco
Re: SC UniPad 0.99 released.
> The SCUnipad Editor is a plain text editor for Unicode. would perhaps be clearer as, The SCUnipad Editor is an editor for plain text Unicode. Best regards, James Kass.
Re: SC UniPad 0.99 released.
The SCUnipad Editor is a plain text editor for Unicode. Support in this case means that it has glyphs which it can display that enable users to enter and edit text in a variety of Unicode encodings. Keyboard options and character map function make it a powerful tool. I'd be lost without it. But, it isn't a Unicode Plain Text Displayer/Reader yet, and doesn't claim to be. The folks at Sharmahd have done a fantastic job in providing this useful editor. Best regards, James Kass.
Re: SC UniPad 0.99 released.
On Mon, 26 Aug 2002, Doug Ewell wrote: > Jungshik Shin wrote: > > disappointed. At first, I was intrigued by their claim that it > > supports Hangul Jamos. I've seen some false claims that Hangul > > that claim. It just treats them as 'spacing characters' instead of > > combining characters. Basically, it's useless except for making > > Unicode code chart (so is Arial MS Unicode.) > > This is one of those cases where the verb "support" is so flexible that > it loses meaning. IMHO, their use of 'support' (for Hangul Jamo and various S&SE Asian scripts) goes beyond the flexibility limit I perceive the word to have.(well, then I'm not a native speaker of English while you're ) Wouldn't you return the product (or request refund) if you purchased it (instead of downloading it free) believing that it supports South and Southeast Asian scripts? I would at least put '*' next to that 'yes' mark and qualify what I mean by 'support'. What would you do if it's your program? > UniPad does include glyphs for individual jamos as > well as precomposed Hangul syllables, which is more than most > non-Korean-specific TrueType fonts can offer. Which is still far from supporting Hangul Jamos. I'm not sure if you can say that including _spacing_ Hangul Jamo glyphs in their *bitmap* font is more than most non-Korean-specific TTF's can offer. Because I know only four non-Korean specific TTF/OTFs striving to be 'pan-Unicode' (or pan-BMP) fonts and at least two of them (Arial MS Unicode and CODE2000. Cyberbit and Titus may or may not.) include _spacing_(i.e. useless) Hangul Jamo glyphs as well as glyphs for precomposed Hangul syllables. Besides, James Kass wrote to me that next release of CODE2000 would include glyphs for Hangul Jamos that can be overstruck over each other to form syllables. Simple overstriking works by making glyphs for leading consonants, vowels and final consonants occupy disjoint portions of a square cell. The result is not very pretty but is similar to the way old mechanical Korean typewriters worked and is certainly a good beginning. Thai script can be supported in a similar manner (ftp://ftp.nectec.or.th/pub/thailinux/cvs/docs/thaisupp/thaisupp.html). > But it does not provide > any mechanism for combining jamos into syllables, which of course is > required for proper handling of Korean. Again, I don't know of any > other mainstream Windows tools or fonts that can do this either > (although I'm sure there are Korean-specific tools that can). Uniscribe, MS IE 6 and MS Office XP count as mainstream Windows 'tools', don't they? As for fonts, you're certainly right. I have yet to see a single OTF with the proper support of Hangul Jamos. (MS Word 2000 came with a couple of Korean fonts with about 2000? Middle Korean precomposed syllables in PUA.) Anyway, according to what Seuk Soo SUNG with MS Korea wrote to this list and to me off the line about a year ago, Uniscribe shipped in Office XP(and Windows XP. perhaps with MS IE 6 as well) can do that just fine _provided_ that OT fonts with necessary gsub/gpos and other tables for Hangul Jamos are present on the system. (Yudit manages to do the same with fonts I'd call 'precursors' to those fonts.) With those fonts and the newest Uniscribe, MS IE 6 and MS Word 2002 can handle over one million syllables (made out of Hangul Jamos). Unfortunately, those fonts are only shipped with _Korean_ version of MS Office XP. I misunderstood what he wrote about fonts and purchased US Office XP for the sole purpose of testing it mistakenly assuming that any language version of Office XP comes with at least one such font. > > Then, I found its claim that it supports 300 languages(scripts). Wow ! > > Does it properly support various South and Southeast Asian scripts? > > Again, it does not. It treats combining characters as spacing > > characters. > UniPad never claims to support 300 scripts. I'm not even sure there are > 300 scripts. Probably half of the 300 "supported languages" are written > with the Latin script. > But again, Jungshik has a good point that true > "support" for Devanagari, Khmer, etc. really does imply shaping and > combining behavior, similar to what UniPad already provides for Arabic. All right. 300 languages. Anyway, I'd never put 'yes' marks (I believe you wouldn't either) for languages like Devanagari, Thai, Bengali, Tibetan, and Lao if my program does not support reordering/shaping/combining for scripts used to represent those languages. Suppose some people living in a remote village of Laos and Tibet stumbled upon SC Unipad web page and were thrilled to find that it supports their languages. How much would they be disappointed if they downloaded it (via a painstakingly slow link) and found that it did not. > 300 scripts. Probably half of the 300 "supported languages" are written > with the Latin script. As we all found out in a recent thread on Middle English, even supporting Latin alphabet based langua
Re: SC UniPad 0.99 released.
Jungshik Shin wrote: > On several occasions, I heard about it on this mailing list and > finally my curiosity drove me to try it. Unfortunately, I was mightly > disappointed. At first, I was intrigued by their claim that it > supports Hangul Jamos. I've seen some false claims that Hangul > Jamos is supported and wanted to see if it really support them. Well, > it does not do any better than most other fonts/software that made > that claim. It just treats them as 'spacing characters' instead of > combining characters. Basically, it's useless except for making > Unicode code chart (so is Arial MS Unicode.) This is one of those cases where the verb "support" is so flexible that it loses meaning. UniPad does include glyphs for individual jamos as well as precomposed Hangul syllables, which is more than most non-Korean-specific TrueType fonts can offer. But it does not provide any mechanism for combining jamos into syllables, which of course is required for proper handling of Korean. Again, I don't know of any other mainstream Windows tools or fonts that can do this either (although I'm sure there are Korean-specific tools that can). > Then, I found its claim that it supports 300 languages(scripts). Wow ! > Does it properly support various South and Southeast Asian scripts? > Again, it does not. It treats combining characters as spacing > characters. I don't think users of those scripts would regard SC > Unipad as supporting their scripts/languages. UniPad never claims to support 300 scripts. I'm not even sure there are 300 scripts. Probably half of the 300 "supported languages" are written with the Latin script. But again, Jungshik has a good point that true "support" for Devanagari, Khmer, etc. really does imply shaping and combining behavior, similar to what UniPad already provides for Arabic. > You may want to check out Yudit (http://www.yudit.org). Although its > author is not so fond of MS Windows, That's putting it mildly -- he refers to Win32 as a "joke-api" [sic] and brags several times that he "will never touch Windows again." > it works in MS Windows as well as in Unix/X11. I haven't downloaded it yet, so I haven't seen whether this is true. I have my doubts, however, based on release notes like the following: "CreateProcess works in an unexpected way so the viewer won't find the file. As a workaround execute yudit from the desktop shortcut." No real Windows application gives a hoot whether you run it from a desktop shortcut, the Start menu, a taskbar button, the Start | Run dialog box, or a command-prompt window. > It supports South and Southeast Asian scripts, Arabic, > Hebrew with BIDI, Hangul Jamos(at the same level as Korean MS Office > XP in terms of the number of syllables made out of Jamos) and many > other (easier-to-deal-with) writing systems with various input > methods/keyboards (including Unicode codepoint in hex input). It can > also represent unrenderable characters with hex code in a box. If it > lacks support for your script/language and you can code, you may be > able to add it yourself either for yourself or with the author's help > as I did for Hangul Jamos. "If you can code" is a big stumbling block for anyone who is not a programmer. But certainly Yudit, like other similar open-source projects, appears to be highly extensible. -Doug Ewell Fullerton, California
Re: SC UniPad 0.99 released.
On Mon, 26 Aug 2002, William Overington wrote: > This latest version is SC UniPad 0.99 and is available for free download > from the following address on the web. > > http://www.unipad.org On several occasions, I heard about it on this mailing list and finally my curiosity drove me to try it. Unfortunately, I was mightly disappointed. At first, I was intrigued by their claim that it supports Hangul Jamos. I've seen some false claims that Hangul Jamos is supported and wanted to see if it really support them. Well, it does not do any better than most other fonts/software that made that claim. It just treats them as 'spacing characters' instead of combining characters. Basically, it's useless except for making Unicode code chart (so is Arial MS Unicode.) Then, I found its claim that it supports 300 languages(scripts). Wow ! Does it properly support various South and Southeast Asian scripts? Again, it does not. It treats combining characters as spacing characters. I don't think users of those scripts would regard SC Unipad as supporting their scripts/languages. Its FAQ 4.2 has the following: SC> We have to differentiate between the simple inclusion of SC> the glyphs into the UniPad font and the implementation of special SC> text processing algorithms. It's definitely our goal to finally support SC> all CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) characters and all Indic scripts SC> (Devanagari, Gurmukhi, etc.). Judging from the above, I think they are well aware that simply including the nominal glyphs for scripts taken from the Unicode code chart in the UniPad font is diffferent from supporting scripts. In addition, its list of general features makes it clear that it does not support 'combined rendering of non-spacing marks'. I can't help wondering, then, why they list Hindi, Thai, Tibetan, Lao, Bengali and many other South and Southeast Asian languages in the list of supported languages. > A particularly interesting new feature is that one may hold down the Control > key and press the Q key and a small dialogue box appears within which one > may enter the hexadecimal code for any Unicode character. Upon pressing the > I first learned of the existence of the UniPad program in a response to a > question which I asked in this forum, so I am posting this note so that any You may want to check out Yudit (http://www.yudit.org). Although its author is not so fond of MS Windows, it works in MS Windows as well as in Unix/X11. It supports South and Southeast Asian scripts, Arabic, Hebrew with BIDI, Hangul Jamos(at the same level as Korean MS Office XP in terms of the number of syllables made out of Jamos) and many other (easier-to-deal-with) writing systems with various input methods/keyboards (including Unicode codepoint in hex input). It can also represent unrenderable characters with hex code in a box. If it lacks support for your script/language and you can code, you may be able to add it yourself either for yourself or with the author's help as I did for Hangul Jamos. Jungshik
Re: SC UniPad 0.99 released.
William Overington wrote: > A particularly interesting new feature is that one may hold down the > Control key and press the Q key and a small dialogue box appears > within which one may enter the hexadecimal code for any Unicode > character. Upon pressing the Enter key, that character is entered > into the document. SC UniPad contains its own font. In a thread two weeks ago about Alt+NumPad sequences, I did mention that SC UniPad 0.99 would include this Ctrl+Q feature. It's a very handy device; my biggest obstacle so far, in fact, is simply *remembering that it's there* and using it, instead of opening Character Map and clicking on the character, which is what I had to do before (and which is still useful if I needed to browse CM to find the character in the first place). > Please note in particular the buttons in a column down the left hand > side of the display. These alter the way in which some code points > are indicated in the display. For example, if one clicks on the > button labelled FMT (which controls Character Rendering: Formatting > Characters)and selects Picture Glyph, then entry of U+200D into the > text document shows a box with the letters ZWJ in it. And best of all, you can set these rendering options independently for space characters, ASCII controls, other formatting characters (a broad category), characters unsupported in the UniPad font (a dying breed; only Plane 2 is not supported), unassigned code points, unpaired surrogates, and private-use characters. Note that unpaired surrogates are supported for testing purposes, but aren't really a good thing to have lying around. Also note that your choices for private-use characters are a generic picture glyph or a rectangle containing the USV in hex -- sorry, you can't install your own PUA font. ALSO, note that the hex-value display option for unassigned code points provides a neat solution to Martin Kochanski's earlier question about .notdef glyphs (and the ensuing discussion where Carl Brown and others suggested 2×2, 2×3, or 3×2 blocks of hex digits). BTW, the View toolbar doesn't have to run down the left side. It's there by default, but you can dock it elsewhere or let it float as a separate window. I have the Convert toolbar on the left side and View on the right because I use Convert more often. > I first learned of the existence of the UniPad program in a response > to a question which I asked in this forum, so I am posting this note > so that any end users of the Unicode system who are at present unaware > of the existence of the UniPad program might know of the opportunity > to have a look at it if they so choose. > > The web site has a facility to request email notification of > developments to SC UniPad. It was by a such requested email > notification that I became aware of the availability of SC UniPad > 0.99. I have asked the main developer of UniPad to post regular update notices on this list, and he says he will do so shortly, when he can put together a more thorough list of the new features in 0.99. Trust me, there are a LOT. ☺ -Doug Ewell Fullerton, California
SC UniPad 0.99 released.
As an end user of Unicode I was interested to learn recently that the latest version of SC UniPad, a Unicode plain text editor for various PCs, has been released. This latest version is SC UniPad 0.99 and is available for free download from the following address on the web. http://www.unipad.org A particularly interesting new feature is that one may hold down the Control key and press the Q key and a small dialogue box appears within which one may enter the hexadecimal code for any Unicode character. Upon pressing the Enter key, that character is entered into the document. SC UniPad contains its own font. Please note in particular the buttons in a column down the left hand side of the display. These alter the way in which some code points are indicated in the display. For example, if one clicks on the button labelled FMT (which controls Character Rendering: Formatting Characters)and selects Picture Glyph, then entry of U+200D into the text document shows a box with the letters ZWJ in it. I first learned of the existence of the UniPad program in a response to a question which I asked in this forum, so I am posting this note so that any end users of the Unicode system who are at present unaware of the existence of the UniPad program might know of the opportunity to have a look at it if they so choose. The web site has a facility to request email notification of developments to SC UniPad. It was by a such requested email notification that I became aware of the availability of SC UniPad 0.99. William Overington 26 August 2002
