On Tue, Mar 12, 2002 at 08:41:49PM -0800, Doug Ewell wrote:
> This will
> necessarily cause the encoding in Patrick's registry to be withdrawn, or
> at least deprecated. How many people will switch immediately to the
> sanctioned Unicode encoding? How quickly will existing software and
> data be converted? Probably not right away, and the chances for a
> timely conversion are less if the private-use encoding is particularly
> successful, whether or not there are scripts available to help people
> make the conversion.
I don't understand the complaint. The people will be encoding the data
in some fashion. If they are using a private-use encoding, then they are
prepared to use Unicode, if possibly not non-BMP characters. And since
you obviously have clued-in people, they will at some point realize
their encoding is obsolete and switch to standardized Unicode - probably
a lot faster than people who have never heard of Unicode.
How many people still use font encodings for their languages? The
Cherokee still do, as far as I can tell - I've never seen a Unicode
encoded Cherokee font (as opposed to a Unicode font with Cherokee.) It
would be considerably harder for them to change to full Unicode - they
would have make sure their systems would handle it, and create mapping
tables for all the font encodings. Where as a Private-use solution
merely has to create one font encoding.
(While speaking of obsolete websites -
www.unicode.org/pending/shavian/shavian.html still exists and says that
Shavian has not been considered by WG2 yet. Since there are sites that
link to it, it might be nice to forward it somewhere with more accurate
information.)
-- David Starner - starner@okstate.edu "It's not a habit; it's cool; I feel alive. If you don't have it you're on the other side." - K's Choice (probably refering to the Internet)
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