Re: Just if and where is the then?

From: African Oracle (oracle@africaservice.com)
Date: Wed May 05 2004 - 12:53:57 CDT


In like manner The Yoruba Digital Consortium
www.africaservice.com/yorubadigital might push the idea of e, o with dot
below and grave or acute accent to make it easier for font and keyboard
developers to implement.

What do you think?

Dele Olawole

----- Original Message -----
From: "Philippe Verdy" <verdy_p@wanadoo.fr>
To: "Doug Ewell" <dewell@adelphia.net>
Cc: "Unicode List" <unicode@unicode.org>
Sent: Wednesday, May 05, 2004 7:27 PM
Subject: Re: Just if and where is the then?

> From: "Doug Ewell" <dewell@adelphia.net>
> > I guarantee you that creating a new 8-bit encoding specific to the
> > language(s) you are dealing with, and getting fonts developed for that
> > encoding, and trying to exchange data in this new encoding with others,
> > will cause more problems for the university than working with Unicode.
>
> For your university yes, most probably, but for local native users of the
script
> I would disagree, there's a radically different usage and need pattern
between
> interchanged data in a heterogeneous environment, and local usage.
>
> I'm not advocating for any private definition of a new 8-bit charset. But
I find
> nothing wrong if a country standardization body wants to promote its own
charset
> to help increase the stability of orthographs, and define a stable subset
> appropriate for a language. If such charsets gets to a national standard;
it
> will give incitations to font makers so that they make the few additions
needed
> in their Unicode fonts.
>
> That's something which seems impossible to ask to font makers when they
are
> exposed to tens of thousands of combinations of letters and diacritics:
unless
> there's a well known standard that exposes the needed combinations, many
of them
> will remain untested and they won't feel that the addition is necessary to
> support users communities in some countries, because they will feel, that
> there's no market incitation to make these corrections.
>
> See how GB18030, whose support for commercial usages was made mandatory,
helped
> to improve the support of larger charsets than the many incomplete ones
that
> were initially made for limited usages badly targeted for China. Since
then, the
> support of Chinese with Unicode has been considerably enhanced on most
> platforms.
>
> National or regional official standards are a great help to improve the
correct
> support of languages. This does not limit the development of Unicode for
> interchanges, even if locally the data can be processed more easily by
smaller
> subsets.
>
> I would say the same for other subsets already registered with ISO/IEC
10646,
> such as European ones: subsets with multiple levels help understanding
which
> characters should have a priority support for a relevant market. Microsoft
made
> a similar initiative by pushing foundries to support at least the WGL4
subset in
> their fonts.
>
> Unicode will remain the worldwide interoperability solution, but I see
nothing
> wrong in regional development initiatives.
>
>
>



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri May 07 2004 - 18:45:25 CDT