From: Richard Wordingham (richard.wordingham@ntlworld.com)
Date: Thu Aug 17 2006 - 15:12:35 CDT
Andrew West wrote on Thursday, August 17, 2006 at 9:51 AM
Subject: Re: Reality check - non-Unicode in Guinea-GTZ documents 2005
> On 17/08/06, Doug Ewell <dewell@adelphia.net> wrote:
>>
>> Would you believe there are actually people so misguided that they
>> believe the purpose of Unicode is just the opposite, to *restrict* the
>> number of languages people can use on the Internet and in computers
>> generally?
>>
>
> Yes, I'd believe that. My experience is that in general most people's
> understanding of Unicode is abysmal, even amongst experienced
> programmers who as a matter of course enable Unicode in all their
> projects.
Purpose or effect? For unsupported complex scripts on Windows, surely
Unicode does have a crippling effect. I hope the crippling will be chipped
away completely, but I fear some scripts will depend on Microsoft's charity
if they are to get the full benefit of Unicode. Or does Vista allow
non-Microsoft layout definitions for complex scripts?
The general refusal to encode more precomposed characters for the Latin
script will also have added to the view of Unicode as restrictive, though
these problems seem to be about to vanish for new computers.
However, for complex scripts, Unicode plus Uniscribe will be restrictive.
How will Windows users add new characters to their complex scripts? Hack
fonts provided a solution - the Private Use Area seems not to be an adequate
replacement.
Richard.
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