Re: DEC multilingual code page, ISO 8859-1, etc.

From: Christopher John Fynn (cfynn@dircon.co.uk)
Date: Thu Mar 30 2000 - 02:05:27 EST


Erik van der Poel <erik@netscape.com> wrote:

> Juliusz Chroboczek wrote:
> >
> > We don't need to upgrade, so we don't.

> If there were good fonts available for the windows-1252 extensions of
> Latin-1, and if people knew that that's what they need to view all those
> Web pages and emails, then they might upgrade (to those fonts, and to
> software that can handle those fonts).

There are of course high-quality, freely available TrueType fonts supporting
windows-1252 (and more) at http://www.microsoft.com/typography/free.htm. I
believe FreeType and some other software running under Unix/Linux + X can handle
these.

Under Windows, ATM supports the whole of windows-1252 using Post Script fonts
with the "Adobe Standard" encoding - so any system or application that can use
standard Post Script fonts for display should be able to render all the
characters in windows-1252 without too much difficulty.

> > In the case for example of the Netscape browser, I would estimate the
> > time it takes for a new version to become dominant at around 18 months
> > (Erik, do you agree)?

> I don't really know... I suspect that it was a lot faster in the old
> days (1.0, 2.0) and that it slowed down considerably for 4.X. It may
> take quite a while for Netscape 6 to become dominant in the Unix world
> (or maybe Konqueror would become dominant (does it support JavaScript,
> etc?)).

If you need it, better Unicode / UTF-8 support may be a good reason to upgrade.

- Chris



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