Re: Terminal Emulation

From: Michael Everson (everson@indigo.ie)
Date: Fri Oct 30 1998 - 06:12:18 EST


Ar 11:09 -0800 1998-10-29, scríobh Kenneth Whistler:
>Michael Everson has posted:
>>
>> A draft of the Terminal Emulation collection with fonts and slightly
>> modified names is available at
>> http://www.indigo.ie/egt/standards/iso10646/pdf/terminal-emulation.pdf
>>
>I must say that I find most of this proposal highly objectionable.

Please, dear readers, note that all Michael Everson did was throw together
some fonts while on the plane to Cardiff (to a Blissymbols meeting) last
week, as a favour to Frank da Cruz, who likes Michael Everson's fonts.

This is NOT Michael Everson's proposal. It is Frank da Cruz' proposal. And
as far as I know, no one has considered it mature. The tables are presented
in order to facilitate the use of Frank da Cruz' proposal.

>The last two charts consist of a completely superfluous set of 256
>characters encoded to be pictures of byte values 0x00..0xFF. As I
>have stated before, these are completely unneeded. Their intent is
>to serve for a debugging display of byte values--but having a set
>of *characters" encoded for this is of no help whatsoever. These are
>suggested *glyphs* for representing byte values visibly. Having a
>set of character codes for these--unrelated to the byte values
>themselves--does not assist in any way I can tell in getting visible
>display of byte values for debugging, whether for terminal emulations
>or not.

I myself have strong misgivings about using the UCS to represent these.

>However, I am opposed to using this opportunity to go down the
>path of inventing a bunch of "control pix" character encodings for
>every other character in Unicode that has no visible representation.
>There is no need to create a control pix character for SYMBOL FOR
>ACTIVATE ARABIC FORM SHAPING. Unicode implementations that wish to
>reveal hidden characters can use existing mechanisms (show hex codes,
>use arbitrary but appropriate graphic forms, use name abbreviations, ...)
>and do not need a useless collection of control pix for these.

That's the "show invisibles" function, is it? Do any Unicode
implementations do this yet?

>The reductio ad absurdum of the approach taken in this proposal has
>got to be XX1F SYMBOL FOR NOT A CHARACTER (!!), whose glyphic representation
>is a dotted box with four "F"'s in it. Does anyone else feel that we've
>just stepped through the looking glass here?

I understood that most of these things could be represented if one "turned
invisibles" on to see what wombats were clttering up one's text. But it
only goes to show that this is not my field of expertise.

--
Michael Everson, Everson Gunn Teoranta ** http://www.indigo.ie/egt
15 Port Chaeimhghein Íochtarach; Baile Átha Cliath 2; Éire/Ireland
Guthán: +353 1 478-2597 ** Facsa: +353 1 478-2597 (by arrangement)
27 Páirc an Fhéithlinn;  Baile an Bhóthair;  Co. Átha Cliath; Éire



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