From: Jeroen Ruigrok van der Werven (asmodai@in-nomine.org)
Date: Fri Jun 27 2008 - 00:26:26 CDT
-On [20080627 02:40], Doug Ewell (dewell@roadrunner.com) wrote:
>I sure wish I could get people to take up arms in support of the
>"correct" hyphen and dash and minus-sign characters as strenuously as
>they do in support of the "correct" apostrophes. In most proportional
>fonts, the ASCII hyphen is very short and looks awful when used in
>negative numbers or subtraction expressions.
It's simple I think:
<user type="average" name="joe">As long as my keyboard does not give me the
appropriate characters I need, I will stick to the ones that are printed on
my keys.</user>
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for proper characters and such, but we're far,
far from that goal, even with Unicode 5.1 released. Most fonts are still
inadequate, most keyboards do not even present alternatives to basic ASCII
characters, most operating systems and their applications have no easy ways
to correct those characters into the more appropriate forms, when viewed on
the computer the difference between the characters is also not always as
clear as you'd expect it, so how can we even expect users to give a damn.
It's all lovely to be sitting here virtually on the Unicode mailinglist, but
what exactly is being done to make the average user aware of the
possibilities he/she has for using the correct characters. How large a
percentage of the people will even care, especially if the means to get
there are cumbersome or not even in place.
To illustrate an even more simplistic case: on a translation list I am on
there are people who at times have to type their Japanese text in specific
applications in order to copy-paste the resulting text in a browser or other
program because their IME does for some reason not work with the browser or
other program.
I'll let you off the hook for using double spacing after a period Doug. :P
-- Jeroen Ruigrok van der Werven <asmodai(-at-)in-nomine.org> / asmodai イェルーン ラウフロック ヴァン デル ウェルヴェン http://www.in-nomine.org/ | http://www.rangaku.org/ | GPG: 2EAC625B I dream of Love as Time runs through my hand...
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