Re: [NTLK] Strange Character?

From: Paul Guyot (pguyot_at_kallisys.net)
Date: Sat Mar 20 2004 - 22:55:17 PST


Aux environs du 21/03/04 à 1:41 -0500, sous le titre "Re: [NTLK]
Strange Character?", Jonathan Ramos prit sa plus belle plume pour
écrire les mots suivants:
>I must not be worrying about too many things these days because this is
>the only great mystery in my life right now.

Just to move that back on topic.

Once upon a time, a lot of software companies developed their own way
to encode things, and Western companies encoded stuff on 8 bits (with
256 characters). Some ways were then standardized but we quickly
realized that 256 characters is a little bit short.

Conversions had to take place here and there and still have to take
place. But they are difficult. For example, let's suppose one of us
post the Euro character on a message on this list. Their e-mail
client will encode it in an encoding that has the Euro symbol (let's
say Latin-9). Let's suppose another user posts an Apple symbol that
is to be found in MacRoman encoding. The List manager software, when
building up the digest, has to convert both the Apple symbol and the
Euro symbol in an encoding that contains both.

Plus, we realized that the notion of characters is much more complex
than what we first thought.

To solve all these problems, a universal encoding system was defined,
called Unicode. It would include all characters (including the Apple
Symbol and the Euro Symbol). But (a) Operating Systems had to handle
it and (b) somehow we had to find a way to draw all these characters
on the screen since fonts previously only included 256 glyphs.

And now, the back on topic part:

I only know one operating system that uses Unicode everywhere except
when it comes to convert data from/to foreign system.

And this system is NewtonOS.

Unfortunately, it has no smart way to switch to another font when
some data cannot be printed on screen. Because all the drawing stuff
rely on Quickdraw, a technology that was developed before Unicode was
even imagined.

(actually, BeOS also used unicode in a lot of places).

Paul

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