If it came out as Unicode has its only goal as money making, that is not
what I meant to say. Nothing can be such. You sell something for the
buyer's benefit, right? I apologize if you feel hurt over it. However, it
is probably the main objective. Who works for nothing except odd crazies
like me?
Many voluntary contributions benefit the owners of Unicode. Unicode is open
for people like me to speak at. In contrast, the agency in Sri Lanka (ICTA)
is closed to the public. Their inspiration is the communist system. That
forces me to work on my own. My situation is like helping someone who
bought a lemon thinking it is a great Cadillac.I say that the bus others
are traveling in is good for him too.
When years back I asked why ligatures formed inside Notepad and not inside
Word, I had the clear reply that it is owing to a business decision.
Let me try to clearly say what I want to say:
1. Unicode came up with the idea of one codepoint for one letter of any
language.
2. The justification was that on one text stream you could show all the
different languages. At least that is what I understood.
3. The above 2 is not practical and does not work even now after so many
years
4. Why Indic code pages do not work so well for text processing is not the
fault of Unicode but that of the user groups
5. However, technology arrived at those countries too late to for actual
users, not bureaucrats, to understand the mistakes
6. Therefore, I say that there was an undue push by Unicode to complete the
standard, by issuing ultimatums for registering ligatures etc.
Having said all that, all is not so bad. I say transliterate to Latin and
make smartfonts. It is a proven success.
You said, "This thread presumes that display is, by orders of magnitude,
the most
important aspect of text processing". That is perfectly met by using
smartfonts.
As for, "every other operation that could be performed on text is
secondary" is beautifully met with fonts too.
I do not understand what you meant by "jury-rigged to accommodate visual
display order". Did you mean using unexpected shapes for Latin codes? If
you meant that, how do you justify earlier versions of Unicode standard
giving specific explanation about codepoints that they do not represent
shapes and Fraktur and Gaelic could very well use Latin as their underlying
codes?
I think the ability to use text in the computer in the way you expect text
to behave in it is very important. For instance, if you have shape
representations mapped to code clusters, scanned text could be more
accurately digitized.
May peace be with you.
On Mon, Nov 14, 2011 at 2:51 PM, Doug Ewell <doug_at_ewellic.org> wrote:
> This thread presumes that display is, by orders of magnitude, the most
> important aspect of text processing, and that every other operation that
> could be performed on text is secondary. Different writing systems all
> represented as font changes, using the same character codes. Backing
> text streams jury-rigged to accommodate visual display order. This is
> where the real insanity lies, for anyone who needs to do more with text
> than display it.
>
> The continued accusations that Unicode has been, and is only, a
> money-making endeavor for someone is too reprehensible and too far
> removed from reality to merit a response.
>
> --
> Doug Ewell | Thornton, Colorado, USA | RFC 5645, 4645, UTN #14
> www.ewellic.org | www.facebook.com/doug.ewell | @DougEwell
>
>
>
Received on Mon Nov 14 2011 - 15:55:50 CST
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.2.0 : Mon Nov 14 2011 - 15:55:57 CST