> There is a character set missing from Unicode. Unicode needs a special hex
> display font.
>
Unicode and fonts are two different things. However, I agree it would be nice
to have a repertoire of characters whose glyphs are hex values, and proposed
this a couple years ago:
ftp://kermit.columbia.edu/kermit/ucsterminal/hex.txt
but after a round of discussion the proposal was rejected by the UTC.
> When I worked on Fujitsu systems they had a special way of displaying
> characters that were not in the font. They had an extended DBCS system
> called JEF and when you attempted to display a character that was not in the
> font the hex value was displayed:
>
> XX
> XX
>
> The hex digits were half size so that they would display in the same size as
> a kanji character. Although you could not see the character, you could send
> a screen shot to a tech and get real help. You could also look the
> character up in a book to see what the character was if it was really
> important.
>
I proposed a repertoire of 256 hex "byte pictures". You can't have one
for every character in Unicode without doubling the size of Unicode. The
argument about displaying unknown characters in hex is that it has nothing to
do with Unicode -- it's simply a display option at the application level.
Other possible reasons for having hex byte pictures are given in the
proposal.
- Frank
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Jul 06 2001 - 00:17:16 EDT