Re: more dingbats in plain text

From: Andrew West (andrewcwest@gmail.com)
Date: Sun Apr 19 2009 - 08:01:22 CDT

  • Next message: David Starner: "Re: more dingbats in plain text"

    2009/4/19 Asmus Freytag <asmusf@ix.netcom.com>:
    >
    > What the font does in this instance is almost totally irrelevant to either
    > users and applications, because most applications don't access fonts
    > directly, they access the various levels of text services provided by the OS
    > (i.e. Windows, in this case).
    >
    > Therefore, for all practical purposes, the text can be encoded either as
    > ASCII or in the PUA.

    Excuse me, but that is ridiculous. The apparent ASCII encoding of the
    text is an extra layer added by Windows (GDI or whatever). Symbol text
    (e.g. "JKL" rendered with Wingdings as smiling/neutral/frowning faces)
    may appear to be encoded in ASCII in certain (even most) Windows
    applications, but it is not guaranteed that such a plain text file
    will render as symbolic text when the Wingdings font is applied under
    all operating systems or under all applications running on Windows
    (e,g, BabelMap will not show "JKL" with Wingdings as faces unless
    explicitly requested to do so). Therefore it is not an ASCII encoding
    of <smiling face><neutral face><frowning face>.

    According to what you say, if I were to write an application that
    applied an extra mapping layer to symbol fonts so that all the glyphs
    mapped in the PUA (or pseudo-PUA according to Peter) in the font are
    also mapped to GB2312 codepoints for Han ideographs so that the text
    "一二三" renders as smiling/neutral/frowning faces then you would have to
    claim that this was GB2312-encoded symbol text.

    Andrew



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