From: John Hudson (john@tiro.ca)
Date: Wed Dec 20 2006 - 13:54:34 CST
Don Osborn wrote:
> First, was the main reason your friend stuck with the old product
> convenience or a perceived problem with Unicode? If the former, I have
> encountered similar attitudes. And I don't see that as a problem so long as
> they are not encouraging other colleagues and students who don't know better
> to use the same solution. On the whole Mike is probably correct that this is
> ever less a problem in academia. WRT the field and locations outside of
> relatively technology-privileged (and Anglophone) environments, see below.
In my experience, people who believe their old (typically non-standard, hack 8-bit
encoding) solutions and workflows are sufficient and resist switching to Unicode tend to
have a fairly limited perception of the possibilities of electronic documents. Their needs
may have been limited, or they may have simply accepted the limitations imposed by their
software, but in either case they tend not to have given a lot of thought to the future
life of the documents they are creating. If all they want to do is to produce e.g. some
paper hand-outs for students, then it might indeed not matter what encoding they use for
the text and what kind of hacked font charset they use. But if they give any thought to
the future, and consider the possibility of these same documents as online resources, then
the benefits of Unicode become more obvious.
The distinction I usually make when I'm explaining this to users is between 'dead
documents' and 'live documents'. There's nothing wrong with making a dead document if you
are reliably assured that you don't need a live document, but if you make only live
documents, then you have a lot more options in terms of interchange, repurposing and
republishing, making use of standard tools for searching, sorting, spellchecking etc.
John Hudson
-- Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com Vancouver, BC john@tiro.ca Marie Antoinette was a woman whose core values were chocolate, sex, love, nature and Japanese ceramics. Frankly, there are worse principles of government than that. - Karen Burshtein
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