At 09:16 PM 1/17/00 -0800, Doug Ewell wrote:
>Janko commented, "Up to now there is no known software which will
>render the same Unicode characters differently if they are tagged as
>text in Serbian!" True, but for that matter, up to now there is also
>no software which will handle Janko's proposed additional Unicode
>characters.
There is a considerable body of software that already supports
rendering of Unicode characters differently depending on the
context.
At the levele where italic/roman distinction is needed, you are talking
about formatted text with either markup or out-of-band information, as
opposed to plain text. This allows you to do one of these things
- request a Serbian italic font in the markup
- tag the text with a language identifier and select Serbian italic
fonts or Serbian italic glyphs at rendering time
- try language recognition and render as above
All very doable and within the realm of things that the current crop of
office automation or desktop publishing software has demonstrated as
possible for some of the other languages they support.
This therefore to me seems more a case of education - it's not a widely
known issue, and font and software vendors need to be more aware of it.
Adding character codes is about the worst solution imaginable, it will
require ALL software to be upgraded, not only the one capable of handling
rich text, for a problem that is rich text specific.
A./
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:20:58 EDT