On Wed, Apr 26, 2000 at 10:54:04 -0800, Robert A. Rosenberg wrote:
> I see it as a Plain Text issue.
Oh my! We have been through this just recently.
> > And the user will never know unless he or she is using an italic font?
>
> No - These characters would ALWAYS use the Serbian not the Russian/Cyrillic
> Codepoints.
>
> If you reread the quote above, you'll note that I stated that when a
> Non-Italic font is used, these codepoints would map to the same glyph shape
> as the Russian/Cyrillic Codepoint
"And the user will never know unless he or she is using an italic font"?
Welcome back to square one.
> just use the Serbian Codepoint and all will work AUTOMATICALLY.
You are talking about taking a shortcut in the display engine. But
this approach will never really WORK automatically for any interesting
values of "work". Don't shift emphasis misleadingly.
Consider this simple scenario. I download a plain text file in
Serbian (cyrillic). I page through it and I see some word. I want to
find another occurence of this word. I enter that cyrillic word
(using my Russian keyboard layout) - and I can't find it because some
letters in that word are in fact Serbian Cyrillic. Loose, loose.
Of course a Serbian user (with Serbian kbd layout) will have exactly
the same problem with non-Serbian cyrillic texts.
You know, FidoNET is still very popular in Russia. In past years
almost all Russian usenet have moved onto fido7.* hiearachy that is
gatewayed between usenet and fido. Because of some weird numerology
about cp866 (DOS cyrillic) CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER EN is mangled by
fidonet software. So they invented a workaround - people use LATIN
CAPITAL LETTER H instead. So when I read news and I see posting
coming from the fidonet side of the fence I have to be conscious to
use latin capital 'H' would I need to search for a word with cyrillic
capital en. Do you really want people to endure this pain with
separate Serbian-specific Unicode characters?
And before I'm accused of Russian chauvinism - I do want Serbian to be
supported and I want it to be supported well. I don't want people to
resort to hacks like separate Serbian characters only because vendors
are not yet able to provide adequate support for Serbian. By
inventing this sort of non-solutions you only corrupt your vendors and
indulge their unawareness and make things worse in the long run. Be
vocal about you needs, educate vendors about Serbian requirements.
SY, Uwe
-- uwe@ptc.spbu.ru | Zu Grunde kommen http://www.ptc.spbu.ru/~uwe/ | Ist zu Grunde gehen
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