At 09:21 29.10.1998 -0800, Trond Trosterud wrote:
>The new Netscape 4.06 has UTF-8 and UTF-7 encodings as two of their
>encoding options. Nowhere in the documentation offered by Netscape or by
>the Netscape personel (that I found) is there knowledge about how this
>works, in an 8-bit world (quite odd, actually, since these two additional
>lines are the only change of that particluar menu of that program). So,
>what is this supposed to be?
Have you checked the
netscape.public.mozilla.i18n
newsgroup ? There you will find people who ought to know the answer.
>- A fanfare for the future, when the OS turn 32 bit?
An operating system does not have to be fully Unicode compliant in order to
run applications that handle 16 bit (UCS-2) or 32 bit (UCS-4) characters,
these characters are simply unsigned integers. The problem is mainly
input/output and the application will have to do things that are handled by
the operating system in fully Unicode compliant operating systems. Even a
dumb terminal can be used for Unicode output if it can accept downloadable
bitmaps for a single character. The same applies to any pixel addressable
output device.
If the output device supports Postscript, the glyphs are identified by
names, so there is not a 256 glyph limit.
So the application has to contain routines to convert the Unicode character
to a bitmap or to Postscript, if the operating system does not directly
support Unicode output.
Paul Keinänen
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