RE: The pointless thread continues

From: Jungshik Shin (jshin@mailaps.org)
Date: Fri Jul 05 2002 - 18:35:12 EDT


On Fri, 5 Jul 2002, David Starner wrote:

> At 10:38 PM 7/5/02 +0200, Marco Cimarosti wrote:
> >Many people know how to install a font on their computer, but they simply
> >have no font to install. Or no computer where to install it: you cannot
> >install your fonts in an Internet café.
>
> You can ask for it to be installed in the cafe. It may not be a quick
> solution,
> but it seems like something a reasonable cafe owner might do.

  Suppose you stop by an internet cafe near a train station in a foreign
country and you have only 5 minutes to check your email via webmail
(or you're sitting at a web terminal at an airport far away from your
country) wouldn't it be handy if web font were used? Of course, even in
this situation, I could read my email in Korean by connecting to a Unix
box with Java-based ssh client (assuming JDK is installed on computers at
the internet cafe, which is more likely than an ssh client is installed )
and piping Korean emails with a Romanization filter.

  By any means, I'm not a great fan of web fonts, but there still appear
to be some cases where it makes sense to use them. Large web-mail
service providers may consider adding an option as to whether to use
webfont or not. In a case mentioned above, this'd certainly help those
who don't know anything about ssh, text-based email clients and Unix.

  It might be interesting to conduct an experiment at internet
cafes(or public libraries/university libraries) throughout the world
similar to what Otto did a couple of weeks ago while visiting other's
office (checking out http://www.i18nguy.com/unicode-example.html). I'm
gonna do it next Monday at the largest internet cafe in Manhattan.
Just one data point: At my school, it was not until about two years
ago that they finally installed CJK fonts on MacOS and WinNT/2k boxes
although free CJK fonts had been available for both platforms for a long
time and there were a sizable body of East Asian students.

  Jungshik Shin



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