On 10/9/2012 1:17 PM, Stephan Stiller wrote:
Ideal would be an editor that gives me previews in an easy-to-use
encoding selection menu that in addition highlights fully or almost-
compatible encodings, highlights (after loading) positions in the file
that don't conform to the requested encoding (and lets me choose how
to handle them), and knows different versions of encodings.
As some codepages had minor additions or corrections in later
versions, it'd be useful to have an editor that offers the choice to
access earlier versions of encodings - this is clearly specialist
usage but the knowledge exists.
Even for character-set wonks like us, it's hard to see that being
useful in a practical sense.
Non-additive changes are rare, yes. Anyways, the main thing is that I
want to see the functionality and knowledge somewhere in a usable
little program; it doesn't necessarily have to be bundled into a
texteditor scenario.
Thanks to all recent replies. I have one quick afterthought about my
second paragraph: While use is indeed limited, knowing different
encodings' versions is really just knowledge, not "functionality": any
editor or piece of software that can deal with different codepages has
in principle the ability to do the same sorts of things with different
codepages' versions. So /that/ is just a question of having that
knowledge be documented somewhere (and put into the right shape), but
(unlike my first paragraph) not one of software features.
Stephan
The problem is that it's nearly impossible to make correct use of that
kind of information.
You very nearly never know which version of a character set a sender or
receiver uses or requires, and even for documents, the best you can tell
is which version(s) (plural) of a given character set a text can be
encoded in. You can't tell whether any edits to a document that would
require one of the newer versions would still be acceptable or not to
the originator.
A./
