From: Michael Everson (everson@evertype.com)
Date: Wed Dec 03 2003 - 06:21:53 EST
At 10:09 +0000 2003-12-03, Arcane Jill wrote:
>I DO expect my own language, and also the symbols I encounter every
>day in my culture, to be available in some form, on an OS bought in
>my own country.
When you own your own country and can make those market requirements
clear to the vendors, they will take more notice.
>I don't believe that anyone could rightly argue that, for instance,
>musical symbols were "esoteric". They're a standard part of my
>culture.
And you think they are more important than full Latin or Cyrillic
support? On my radio interview the other week one of the callers was
asking about support for Sami. There are many people still unable to
write anything beyond Latin 1. That's a lot worse than your problem
with the treble clef. You can get a treble clef glyph ANYWHERE if you
need one. (You are right though about being able to display it own
web sites. Perhaps you will appreciate my interest in encoding the
LITTER DUDE.)
>This should be as straightforward as putting these letters into this email.
And it will be, in time.
>By exactly the same reasoning, I expect all the math symbols to be
>there too, including mathematical alphanumeric symbols. This is not
>a strange or exotic requirement, it's just a part of living in this
>western culture and wanting to use they symbols of my culture. All
>these arguments about how I don't really need Telugu or whatever are
>probably true, but, come on guys, there are symbols we do use,
>frequently, at least on paper, that we can't use on the web. That
>has got to be wrong.
I think some of what you are saying here is really ethnocentric and a
bit offensive. There are 69 million speakers of Telugu. I don't think
your need for math symbols outweighs their need to send basic e-mail
and do online banking. And you can get math software for your
platform if you really need it. Mathemeticians do.
-- Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
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