Re: Fwd: Unicode on mobile devices

From: vunzndi@vfemail.net
Date: Wed Apr 30 2008 - 04:50:53 CDT

  • Next message: Tom Gewecke: "Re: Unicode on mobile devices"

    Quoting Kai Hendry <hendry@aplixcorp.com>:

    > Apologies for the potential repost. I don't think my original got through.
    >
    > After a call today with an Opera employee, he informed me rightly that
    > many handset manufacturers are unprepared for the license cost of
    > fonts with a wide Unicode glyph coverage.
    > This led me to fear a "region locking" scenario of mobile devices.
    > Any comments?
    >

    There are many issues here not just fonts. One common issue is the
    files system used - many mobile devices only have filesystems which
    support the BMP, which limits things even if if utf8 is used. Another
    thing to bear in mind is that many mobile devices do not use ttf
    fonts, but various rasta formats type fonts.

    In the past storage space was often an issue for mobile devices.

    In the long term one would hope to see full unicode support for mobile
    devices.

    John Knightley

    > ---------- Forwarded message ----------
    > From: Kai Hendry <hendry@aplixcorp.com>
    > Date: Mon, Apr 28, 2008 at 10:38 AM
    > Subject: Unicode on mobile devices
    > To: unicode@unicode.org
    >
    >
    > Since new Web growth is "predicted" to happen on mobile devices, I
    > have been naively looking into i18n tests for charsets and Unicode
    > glyphs. Idea is, you can buy a phone that passes this imaginary
    > Unicode Acid test and you would then know it should have basic support
    > for reading your culture's language.
    > http://dev.w3.org/2008/mobile-test/test.html
    >
    > The good news from my little survey with contacts in Asia, UTF-8 seems
    > to be gaining popularity (in Japan/Korea) compared to "legacy"
    > encodings except perhaps China: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GB2312
    > Also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GBK
    >
    > So assuming utf8, I wondered if it was then worthwhile to test for
    > certain popular/key glyphs?
    > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_Internet_users
    >
    > I believe the age old argument that all/most of the glyphs can't be on
    > a mobile device no longer holds, with memory being so inexpensive.
    > Anyone have any rough ideas how much storage space the most complete
    > glyph collection would take? Perhaps I am wrong. :)
    >
    > Any helpful pointers would be great. Thanks for your time,
    >
    >

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