> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf > Of Philippe Verdy
> > I guarantee you that creating a new 8-bit encoding specific to the > > language(s) you are dealing with, and getting fonts developed for that > > encoding, and trying to exchange data in this new encoding with others, > > will cause more problems for the university than working with Unicode. > > For your university yes, most probably, but for local native users of the script > I would disagree, there's a radically different usage and need pattern between > interchanged data in a heterogeneous environment, and local usage. Philippe, my experience working for many years with SIL tells me otherwise. There were a lot of costs and lost productivity that resulted from local users using custom 8-bit encodings. We used to do it because there was no alternative. Now there is an alternative, however, and Unicode is definitely the better choice for the local users, because they will be able to obtain fonts & software that support their language far more readily, and they become much less dependent on IT specialists to help them (a) implement support for their language and (b) help them work around the myriad issues they encounter when trying to get software that has no awareness of a custom encoding to do what they want. And if you reply that you mean new 8-bit ISO-standard encodings, as far as existing software is concerned, that would be just as unsupported as a custom encoding would be. Peter Peter Constable Globalization Infrastructure and Font Technologies Microsoft Windows Division