From: Jungshik Shin (jshin@mailaps.org)
Date: Sun Dec 15 2002 - 20:32:48 EST
On Sun, 15 Dec 2002, Avarangal wrote:
> If you are preparing a Tamil document, intended for long term use you must
> use Unicode Encoding. Any other approach you take can be considered a
Absolutely.
> Unfortunately Windows 95 and Windows 98 can only read Unicode pages.
> You can write in Unicode using Windows NT, 2000, XP and linux.
Even under Win 9x/ME, there are free and commercial word processors,
and editors to enable you to make files in UTF-8 or UTF-16. For instance,
yudit(http://www.yudit.org) has supported Tamil (both UTF-8 and TSCII)
for over a year now.
> 2/
>
> You know we all use Tamil eMail and for that we can not use Unicode.
> For Tamil eMail we use 8bit encoding called TSCii. I'm sorry to say that
> you still need to use this 8 bit encoding (which is not Unicode),
What is 'Tamil eMail'? Is it a web mail service for Tamil?
> because
> Unicode is not mature enough to be used in multilingual email yet.
> You just have to make do with the 8bit TSCII encoding for Tamil eMail.
I don't understand what you meant by Unicode not being
mature enough to support multilingual emails. Modern email clients like
Netscape7/Mozilla, MS Outlook (Express), and Mutt support UTF-8 very well.
If you believe in Unicode, there's no reason not to promote UTF-8 right
now for email exchange. Of course, some people relying on **broken**
Web mail services that assume that there's one-to-one relationship
between languages and encodings for them would have trouble reading UTF-8
messages, but that's not a fault of Unicode but that of those web mail
services. Unfortunately, most web mail services(hotmail, Yahoo, Lycos,
etc) are broken in that aspect. (btw, I have made a patch to a popular
opensource web mail program, IMP, to make it better support multilingual
emails, but there are stil rough edges in my patch)
Jungshik
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sun Dec 15 2002 - 21:15:17 EST