Re: ISO10646-1 XLFD registration (Plane 1 and higher)

From: Markus Kuhn (Markus.Kuhn@cl.cam.ac.uk)
Date: Tue Apr 04 2000 - 10:29:35 EDT


Kenneth Whistler wrote on 2000-04-03 17:17 UTC:
> Markus wrote:
>
> > The question of what to do with other planes came up and there are
> > various options, including but not limited to
> >
> > - finally doing the urgently needed fundamental revision of the X11 font
> > architecture, which should provide for
> >
> > o 31-bit character set
>
> You may want to also consider the *21*-bit option now.

Why? If we extend APIs and data structures from 16-bit integer types,
then very naturally we will use 32-bit integer types. I see nowhere any
benefit whatsoever in artificially introducing restrictions for
character/glyph identifiers to 21 bits, especially not just because the
UTF-16 crowd jumps up and down for political reasons, shouting "Ho, the
Lord said UTF-32 and *nothing* but UTF-32!". Unless you convince
processor designers to add 20.1 bit integer types ...

Markus

-- 
Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK
Email: mkuhn at acm.org,  WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>



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