On Thu, Mar 14, 2002 at 12:35:10AM -0800, Rick McGowan wrote:
> If a script disappears because the community who uses it decides that it's
> not worth using since no software supports it (or ever will support it),
> that would be a sad situation.
They can probably either create a font encoding, or they probably
couldn't use it with Unicode - systems that handle complex scripts, like
Windows XP, don't usually run on the class of systems that endangered
cultures have access to.
> I would rather lose a few dollars from the
> Cirth & Tengwar enthusiasts -- who are probably all basking in the riches
> of industrialized countries and have their fonts and their fast CPUs anyway
Isn't that who needs a Unicode encoding, people who have Unicode enabled
systems that tend to store and edit data on computer?
> -- than go down in history as part of the doltish generation that ignored
> oodles of underprivileged minority scripts to their respective extinctions.
So if this generation would be doltish, what about the one that had
computers that only handled ASCII, or the one that actively tried to
destroy the language and script?
And if it was really important, why weren't the characters that Native
American languages use encoded precomposed? Non-precomposed characters
are hard to virtually impossible to use on most systems in current use;
but if you are "basking in the riches of industrialized countries and
have ... fast CPUs" and run a system like XP that can handle it, then
your native language probably comes precomposed.
And if it's so important to encode minority scripts that Tengwar and
Cirth must be pushed back, why were Old Italic, Gothic and Shavian
encoded? Why are these users so much more important than the users of
Tengwar and Cirth?
-- 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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