From: David Starner (prosfilaes@gmail.com)
Date: Tue Oct 02 2007 - 11:28:40 CST
On 10/1/07, Dmitry Turin <unicode20@narod.ru> wrote:
> And plain text does not need whole heavy (!) programming library to render,
> it needs only little programming code.
Unicode already stresses what can be done by many Unicode renderers,
and many places that support plain text already ignore harder parts of
Unicode. (And no, they won't get fixed, because fixing, say,
character-cell terminals to support all of Unicode would require
throwing out the technology and rewriting the specifications from the
ground up.) If you add another complex rendering feature, the only
things that will really attempt to handle it are things that attempt a
full Unicode implementation, which generally have a rich text renderer
at hand wherever people would really need this feature.
Heavy programming library? TeX was written in the 70s and early 80s,
and originally finalized in 1982. It ran on machines like the VAX--a
1985 model is listed as coming with 1 MB of onboard memory, and the
1977 VAX is known for having "about" one MIPS of computing power.
Recently, for $500, I bought a computer with monitor and everything
that has 1 GB of memory and roughly 5000 MIPS of computing power. TeX
isn't heavy by any modern standard, and there's no reason not to turn
to it or something like it when you actually need its services.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Tue Oct 02 2007 - 11:31:06 CST