Chris Pratley wrote:
>
> BTW, with IE and Office, we try to support the text and HTML encodings used
> on Windows, DOS, Mac, Unix, and even EBCDIC (no, we don't handle Atari or
> TRS-80 yet nor will we) but I see a lot of complaints from Unix users on
> this list about not being able to read HTML pages encoded in windows-1252
> when the characters in the 80-CF range are used. I'm curious why the makers
> of whatever browsers these are don't simply add support for non-ISO
> encodings like windows-1252 and be done with it (whether windows-1252 is
> registered at the glacial IANA or not shouldn't matter - we tried to
> register windows-1252 there for years with no response, yet the missing
> registration is claimed to be the fault of Microsoft. Bizarre). Isn't it
> fairly trivial and also worthwhile to support this encoding?
Until recently, there hasn't been much of an attempt to improve the
glyph repertoire on standard distributions of X Windows. For years,
people were limited to iso-8859-1. Now a number of people affiliated
with XFree86 are working on extensions of the glyph sets. A number of
fonts have the -iso10646-1 suffix, which is essentially the BMP of
Unicode (UCS-2), although they don't contain glyphs for *all* of the
characters in that plane (nor is it possible to do that, since there
isn't a one-to-one correspondence between characters and glyphs). But I
digress.
For Mozilla, since we don't expect *all* users to have these new fonts,
I recently added support for "transliteration" (if that's the correct
term?), where characters like the euro (U+20AC) are transliterated to
the 3-glyph sequence "EUR" if no font containing the euro can be found
on the X server. The other windows-1252 characters in the 0x80-0x9F
range are also transliterated, e.g. trademark -> (tm), smart quotes ->
ASCII single and double quotes, etc.
Erik
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:21:00 EDT