Sorry if I gave the impression I was attacking software. What I meant to
convey was befuddlement that years go by with people still complaining that
encodings like cp1252 don't work on their machines, and there is
*apparently* no progress (bewildering given that once a UA is Unicode,
adding support for cp1252 is trivial as Erik and others have noted). I
confess I know little about the state of Unicode development on the Unix
platform, so this thread has been very enlightening. It is interesting to
hear that people don't update their software very often.
I presume that the people who complain for some reason are unable to use the
products you mention below. Is that the case?
-----Original Message-----
From: Juliusz Chroboczek [mailto:jec@dcs.ed.ac.uk]
Sent: March 29, 2000 3:09 PM
To: Unicode List
Subject: Re: DEC multilingual code page, ISO 8859-1, etc.
Chris,
Could I please ask you to refrain from attacking software which you
are barely, if at all, familiar with?
Chris Pratley <chrispr@microsoft.com>:
CP> This is what prompted this thread initially - I am bewildered by
CP> the lack of progress of Unicode support on non-Windows platforms
CP> (Mac is doing fine, but Unix is the laggard).
This is just not true. Netscape for X11 has supported Unicode for the
Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Han, Kana and Hangul scripts (possibly others)
since 4.0. Lynx has supported mapping Unicode to whatever the
underlying terminal's charset is for as long as I can remember. CDE's
dtterm and the Linux console have supported UTF-8 for ages, and XTerm
for over a year now.
Here's a screenshot of some work in progress (Erik's competitors, I
fear):
http://www.kde.org/konqueror/pics/konq_bidi.png
As to typesetting, the ``Omega'' variant of TeX has been available for
years.
The thing that you fail to grasp, Chris, is that deployment happens
slower in the Unix-like world than it does in the Windows world. Many
Linux users I know (including myself) have never done a wholesale
upgrade of their system, only upgrading components that they felt the
need to upgrade. People will upgrade when Unicode content becomes
common.
CP> But this would be some B-movie cartoon caricature of Microsoft,
CP> which is actually staffed by real humans trying to create great
CP> Unicode software...
...which they can then give to management who prevent the public from
using it. The Uniscript episode was plainly embarassing.
J.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:21:00 EDT
