Re: [NTLK] Greek Fonts 'n Unicode

From: Paul Guyot (pguyot_at_kallisys.net)
Date: Mon Jun 10 2002 - 01:58:41 EDT


Date: Sun, 9 Jun 2002 08:56:21 -0700
From: "Michael 'Mickey' Sattler" <michael_at_GeekTimes.com>

>It's damned easy to explain and understand.

On the contrary. There are several concepts: letters, characters,
glyph, encodings, charsets, etc. that aren't very easy to
distinguish, even for nerds.

>Unicode uses two bytes per letter, so it can hold many more. Not
>enough for some languages, and that's a political thing, but enough
>for most things right now. And that's Unicode.

Well, it's characters and some characters are encoded with 4 bytes.
It's totally enough for all languages. The political thing is to
accept or refuse character sets. For example, Klingon character set
was refused in 2001.

>It's kind of a pain, so unless you're working on a commercial software
>package it just isn't worth the effort.

Ahem!

It's not only a question of localization. Many software are useless
to non American or people speaking European languages because they
were poorly written by american-centric or illiterate
english-speaking people (in English, some words normally take
accents). Just an example: Waba.
You can't use accents within your waba program. They don't print
correctly (Palm) or it eats the end of the strings (Newton). Just
because developers didn't care about accents and left bugs in the
UTF-8 handling code.
(however, I vaguely remember reading that this nasty bug was fixed in
the Palm version, maybe it was SuperWaba).

Paul

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