2011/11/14 Philip TAYLOR <p.tay...@rhul.ac.uk>: > > > Keith J. Schultz wrote: > >> So, Unicode needs an editor to be displayed correctly. > > Why ? Not meant to sound aggressive, but seems a very > odd assertion, IMHO. Editors are for changing things; > why would you need a program intended to change things > just to display Unicode ? > >> Now, for the youngsters XML, TeX, HTML are per definition plain text >> files. > > No, they are text files, not /plain/ text files. Look > at some mime types : > > text/plain (for plain text) > text/html (for HTML) > It's not the encoding that determines whether it is a plain text. Texts in ISO 8859-1, CP852, UTF-8, UTF-16, BIG-5 can be plain texts. LTR/RTL is no problem in modern editors, I can easily combine Czech/English/Hindi/Urdu (uses arabic script) in a single document, the languages/scripts may even be mixed within a paragraph. What determines whether it is or is not a plain text is the presence or absence of control characters or commands no matter whether the file can be viewed and/or edited in a plain text editor such as vim or notepad. If I type < I wish it to mean "less that" but in XML it marks the element tag, If I need such a character in XML or SGML, I have to write < no matter what editor I use. If it were plain text, < would mean ampersand followed by the letters lt and a semicolon. If I type & in a plain text, it means "and". If I type it in a TeX file, it is a special character for \halign (unless \catcode is changed), in XML and SGML it means that all following characters up to the first semicolon is an entity name. If I have to insert an ampersand, I have to write \& in TeX or & in XML and SGML. There are different methods how to enter A, eg ^^41 in TeX or A in XML and SGML. As Phil wrote, there is a clearly defined MIME type for a plain text.
> Philip Taylor > > > -------------------------------------------------- > Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: > http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex > -- Zdeněk Wagner http://hroch486.icpf.cas.cz/wagner/ http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz -------------------------------------------------- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex