Re: [NTLK] Greek Fonts 'n Unicode

From: Paul Guyot (pguyot_at_kallisys.net)
Date: Mon Jun 10 2002 - 11:42:53 EDT


Date: Sun, 9 Jun 2002 23:30:48 -0700
From: "Michael 'Mickey' Sattler" <michael_at_GeekTimes.com>

> >It's totally enough for all languages.
>
>Au contraire.

I was mentionning here: with surrogates.

>If memory serves there was a lot of grief among member
>groups because the space alotted to them was not enough for their
>entire character set.

Exactly. Your link is a good historical summary.

>and it seems that some modern tweak on this, surrogates, might have
>been kludged on to fix this problem, but I didn't read far (and my
>memories of this are from the early 90s)...

NewtonOS doesn't handle surrogates.

>I'm not sure we're disagreeing there.

We weren't disagreeing with surrogates and being able to handle every
characters, but there is definitely a gap between us for the correct
handling of encodings in published software.

>I don't say that supporting
>Unicode in software isn't worthwhile, only that it's a PITA.

It's definitely not if you're accustomed to and have tools &
libraries capable of handling them.

>If I'm
>whipping up a small something, or even a mid-sized something, it's so
>much easier to use simple ASCII handling rather than doing Unicode
>throughout. And that's just the I/O. Adding true localization is
>another PITA, and locale-saavy internationalization is yet another
>PITA.

Well, if you publish your software, you'd better handle this kind of
problems when it's critical (e.g. Waba). Otherwise, it will be a PITA
for users :)

The goal of software isn't to force users to get acustomed to them
(for example by learning how to to write without accents). It is to
help users with their productivity.

It's not a matter of commercial software or not. If your software
isn't good enough for being used, don't publish it.

I might seem not very tolerant here, but my life would have been much
easier if some programmers avoided to publish their buggy/incomplete
piece of code.

Paul

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