>I would rather say simply that Unicode is the only character set
>that exists for certain markets. I believe this is true, but
>would like to have at least a few examples of scripts or
>languages that have no other code pages but Unicode.
>I have in mind Inuktitut and perhaps Byzantine music, but its
>a bit hard to establish that there are no other code pages.
There are *always* other code pages. There are several for Inuktitut, for
example. The problem is that they are generally proprietary to small groups
of users or particular products, and what lacks is a standard. Unicode
provides a solution to what has been an **incredible** mess for a lot of
writing systems. That's a **huge** benefit.
Others in this category -- no widely accepted standard other than Unicode,
but lots of non-standard code pages in use -- probably include Ethiopic,
Burmese, Lao, Syriac, Old Italic, Gothic, Deseret, Runic, Ogham, IPA
(definitely), Thaana, Tibetan, Cherokee, polytonic Greek, and Math.
Even for scripts that have had standard codepages, there have been multiple
non-standard codepages in use. This is definitely the case with Indic
scripts, where people have devised presentation-form encodings to be able
to work with software that has no smart-font rendering support. Then
there's also cases in which standards exist for a given script, but are not
adequate for certain lesser-known languages, causing users to devise
non-standard codepages. I know this has happened for Cyrillic, and big-time
for Latin.
Unicode (and smart-font rendering technologies) provides us the opportunity
to leave behind all of this non-standard stuff, as well as the multiple
legacy standards, and deal with a single comprehensive code page. That is
an *enormous* benefit.
- Peter
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Peter Constable
Non-Roman Script Initiative, SIL International
7500 W. Camp Wisdom Rd., Dallas, TX 75236, USA
Tel: +1 972 708 7485
E-mail: <peter_constable@sil.org>
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Jul 06 2001 - 00:17:16 EDT