From: Asmus Freytag (asmusf@ix.netcom.com)
Date: Wed Mar 24 2004 - 18:08:31 EST
At 02:58 PM 3/24/2004, Thomas Kuehne wrote:
>Am 2004-03-23 20:23 schrieb Asmus Freytag:
> > I don't think I know of a scenario where it is crtical for a
> > resource limited device to display the kinds of texts you list
> > below.
>
>Reading the font data and processing it into a display representation
>poses the same resource costs for mirrored, rotated and "normal"
>glyphs.
>
>The limitations are mainly processing speed and memory/storage. On the
>display side there are few potential problems.
Unless you eventually display text, you don't need to deal with direction
control. That's why I used the term 'display' in posing my question earlier.
Let me rephrase it: I don't think I know of a scenario where it is
critical for a resource limited device to support the selection of vertical
vs. non-vertical display of text.
Unless there is some such scenario, there's no need to even speculate
about alternatives to existing markup languages. I have not seen a
credible scenario.
Bidirectional controls are different: Even on the most limited device
displaying text, for example for text messages on a cell phone, you
need to run the bidirectional algorithm for bidi scripts. As the algorithm
uses heuristics, some form of additional controls are needed to disambiguate
certain cases. Many 8-bit sets support only a subset of these, i.e. RLM/LRM,
but not the additional set of stateful controls.
See for example UTR#20 (http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr20/) why having
control codes for these purposes can cause issues in migrating text between
plain text and marked-up text.
A./
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