Re: minimizing size (was Re: allocation of Georgian letters)

From: Sinnathurai Srivas (sisrivas@blueyonder.co.uk)
Date: Thu Feb 07 2008 - 12:06:06 CST

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    There is also this question, when is it feasible to introduce complex
    rendering and when it is feasible not to introduce complex rendering. Do we
    have a cut-over point, such as character counts or any such criteria?

    When is this complex rendering non-working situation going to change.
    Particularly in Publishing. I think primarily, the scripts need support for
    publishing rather than applications or web applications though these are
    important too. When is the problem inherent to publishing using
    Unicode-complex rendering going to be resolved. Is it time to think of
    redesigning the encoding itself or do we wait for a few more years?

    Finally, when will we be even consider the phenominan of bitmap characters
    in Unicode? (Hand held or giant machinery!)

    Sinnathurai

    ----- Original Message -----
    From: "Douglas Davidson" <ddavidso@apple.com>
    To: "Michael S. Kaplan" <michka@trigeminal.com>
    Cc: "Jeroen Ruigrok van der Werven" <asmodai@in-nomine.org>;
    <unicode@unicode.org>; "William J Poser" <wjposer@ldc.upenn.edu>
    Sent: 07 February 2008 17:31
    Subject: Re: minimizing size (was Re: allocation of Georgian letters)

    >
    > On Feb 7, 2008, at 3:22 AM, Michael S. Kaplan wrote:
    >
    >> Having flown halfway around the world to talk to people who for whatever
    >> reasons, both valid and invalid (and not really distinguishing which is
    >> which on their list of concerns), are unhappy with a language encoding
    >> that in their view doubles or worse the amount of bytes used to store
    >> their language in Unicode, I can tell you that this as very real concern
    >> on some people's minds.
    >>
    >> True or false, it is on their minds. They can all add and multiply, and
    >> it certainly looks like a 2x or 3x situation to them.
    >>
    >> And we get a lot further by acknowledging their concerns and then
    >> showing them that they have less to be concerned about than they think,
    >> in the end, then we ever would by telling them there are wrong, wrong,
    >> wrong.
    >
    > One mitigating factor is that many document formats have at least an
    > option to employ some form of compression. For example, both OOXML and
    > ODF are zip-archived XML, which means that most text will usually end up
    > being compressed. If one is concerned about sending HTML over the wire,
    > then one can use HTTP compression. Obviously these are general-purpose
    > compression algorithms, not text-specific ones, but they still should be
    > able to help. Actually, in most XML and HTML documents, a large
    > proportion of the characters are ASCII markup anyway, so the overall
    > expansion is not going to be 2x or 3x in the first place. Furthermore,
    > in many cases the size of the text in any form is less significant than
    > the size of other data such as images.
    >
    > Douglas Davidson
    >
    >
    >



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