From: Peter Constable (petercon@microsoft.com)
Date: Wed May 05 2004 - 07:35:32 CDT
> From: unicode-bounce@unicode.org [mailto:unicode-bounce@unicode.org]
On
> Behalf Of Philippe Verdy
> It's up to African communities or governments or local instituions and
> educational organizations to decide if they wish such encoding, if
this
> development is justified by a reasonable reduction of costs with an
> increased
> compatibility with low-cost softwares and systems, and simplified
> processes to
> get appropriate fonts and input methods supporting a well-defined and
> reduced
> subset, needed for the languages they wish to normalize and stabilize
with
> an
> accepted orthography that can be taught.
Establishing new 8-bit encoding standards will not reduce costs,
increase compatibility with any existing software or systems. I do not
see how it could affect the difficulty in acquiring input methods. It
might make it easier for someone to develop fonts, but given the
existence of fonts (including some that are available at no cost) that
support the text elements in question, it cannot make acquisition of
such fonts easier. In fact, it will have the opposite effect since the
only fonts that will work are those that the community creates
themselves.
> I see absolutely no problem if new ISO-8859-* variants is added in the
> future
> for better support of African or Asian languages (or even for European
> ones,
> i.e. Georgian and Armenian), and no opposition of principles if some
newer
> ISO2022 charset is created for Canadian Syllabics or Ethiopic if this
> helps
> processing the corresponding languages.
IMO, the only people it would help are people that can earn their living
developing such new standards.
Peter Constable
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