Re: Unicode HTML, download

From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Sun Nov 21 2004 - 16:23:46 CST

  • Next message: Edward H. Trager: "Re: [increasingly OT--but it's Saturday night] Re: Unicode HTML, download"

    From: "Doug Ewell" <dewell@adelphia.net>
    > Cryptically naming these two CSS classes ".he" and ".heb", which
    > provides no indication of which is the Unicode encoding and which is the
    > Latin-1 hack, merely makes a bad suggestion worse.

    It was not cryptocraphic: "he" was meant for Hebrew (generic, properly
    Unicode encoded, suitable for any modern Hebrew), and "heb" for Biblic
    Hebrew where a legacy encoding may still be needed, in absence of workable
    Unicode support for now: this won't be the same language however, so a
    change of encoding may be justified. I was not advocating for mixing
    encodings within the same text for the same language...

    But I was nearly sure that a technical jargon in Hebrew would probably not
    need Biblic Hebrew, except for illustration purpose within small delimited
    block quotes or spans, where there will be simultaneously changes of:
    - language level
    - needed character set, some characters not being encodable with Unicode
    - a needed changed encoding (from Unicode to Latin-1 override hack)
    - specific font to render the legacy encoding.
    In that case, it is acceptable to have the general text in modern Hebrew
    properly coded with Unicode, even if the small illustrative quotes remain
    fully in a non standard mapping, and won't appear correctly without the
    necessary font.

    Note that PDF files DO mix encodings within the embedded fonts that PDF
    writers dynamically create for only the necessary glyphs. These encodings
    are specific to the document, for each embedded font... This is why PDF
    files can encode text that still don't have Unicode character mappings. You
    can see that when you attempt to copy/paste text fragments from PDF files in
    sections using embedded fonts; the pasted text will not reproduce the same
    characters as what you can see in the PDF reader; copy/pasting however works
    for PDF files using external fonts with standard mappings.



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