Re: Unicode 4.0 is online at last!

From: Peter Kirk (peter.r.kirk@ntlworld.com)
Date: Thu Aug 14 2003 - 14:24:04 EDT

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    On 14/08/2003 10:43, Rick McGowan wrote:

    >Peter Kirk suggested...
    >
    >
    >
    >>Interesting and a little embarrassing that Unicode's own documentation
    >>is not Unicode compatible!
    >>
    >>
    >
    >I don't think it's very embarrassing... The Unicode consortium after all
    >doesn't produce book editing and typesetting software, we use other
    >peoples' software.
    >
    >
    Well, yes, but several members of the consortium do produce such
    software. And indeed the software being used is produced by a consortium
    member. Perhaps the embarrassment should be more that member's, that
    their software is not Unicode compatible. Well, I guess they are working
    on it!

    >I think it's rather amazing that we can now actually produce a PDF of the
    >entire book. This is incredibly better than the situation ten years ago.
    >
    >
    Indeed!

    >In any case, perhaps you can you suggest a "Unicode conformant" authoring
    >tool that is up to the task of editing and typesetting the standard itself?
    >It must have at least the capability of Framemaker 6 (i.e., tables,
    >figures, sectioning, table-of-contents, index, etc) whilst implementing the
    >full standard, including all scripts... Even the ones that would be newly
    >defined in the next version... ;-)
    >
    > Rick
    >
    >
    >
    >
    Well, would Framemaker 7 do any better? Maybe Framemaker 8 will! :-)

    Actually this is a serious problem hindering the deployment of Unicode.
    Many of the people I have been working with are reluctant to change from
    legacy solutions to Unicode because of the prospect that they will have
    to convert their data back into some different legacy solution for
    typesetting. A serious typesetting package with full Unicode
    capabilities, and no need to acquire separate versions for each script
    to be used, would find a large market worldwide.

    -- 
    Peter Kirk
    peter@qaya.org (personal)
    peterkirk@qaya.org (work)
    http://www.qaya.org/
    


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