Re: texteditors that can process and save in different encodings

From: Asmus Freytag <asmusf_at_ix.netcom.com>
Date: Tue, 09 Oct 2012 18:57:37 -0700

On 10/9/2012 1:17 PM, Stephan Stiller wrote:
>
>>>> Ideal would be an editor that gives me previews in an easy-to-use
>>>> encoding selection menu that in addition highlights fully or almost-
>>>> compatible encodings, highlights (after loading) positions in the file
>>>> that don't conform to the requested encoding (and lets me choose how
>>>> to handle them), and knows different versions of encodings.
>
>>>> As some codepages had minor additions or corrections in later
>>>> versions, it'd be useful to have an editor that offers the choice to
>>>> access earlier versions of encodings - this is clearly specialist
>>>> usage but the knowledge exists.
>>>
>>> Even for character-set wonks like us, it's hard to see that being
>>> useful in a practical sense.
>>
>> Non-additive changes are rare, yes. Anyways, the main thing is that I
>> want to see the functionality and knowledge somewhere in a usable
>> little program; it doesn't necessarily have to be bundled into a
>> texteditor scenario.
>
> Thanks to all recent replies. I have one quick afterthought about my
> second paragraph: While use is indeed limited, knowing different
> encodings' versions is really just knowledge, not "functionality": any
> editor or piece of software that can deal with different codepages has
> in principle the ability to do the same sorts of things with different
> codepages' versions. So /that/ is just a question of having that
> knowledge be documented somewhere (and put into the right shape), but
> (unlike my first paragraph) not one of software features.
>
> Stephan
>
The problem is that it's nearly impossible to make correct use of that
kind of information.

You very nearly never know which version of a character set a sender or
receiver uses or requires, and even for documents, the best you can tell
is which version(s) (plural) of a given character set a text can be
encoded in. You can't tell whether any edits to a document that would
require one of the newer versions would still be acceptable or not to
the originator.

A./
Received on Tue Oct 09 2012 - 21:01:37 CDT

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