Re: Hex-byte pictures (WAS: RE: Hexadecimal digits?)
From: Simon Butcher [EMAIL PROTECTED] BTW, Frank also had other proposals which included the IBM 3270 characters I think you were referring to (poke around the directory at http://www.funet.fi/pub/kermit/ucsterminal/).. I am not proposing to encode all terminal function indicators in Unicode. Else it would mean that we could as well standardize of those many icons found in toolbars of GUI applications. If these symbols appear in printed documentations, they are still snapshots of icons used in a particular program or device, and not intended to be part of interchanged documents... Even today we don't need to encode icons in plain text to make program documentations: we use images instead, even if they cannot be exhibited in plain text documents. Our modern online documentation uses HTML or PDF or .DOC with other embedded graphics in various (bitmap or vectorial) formats.
RE: Hex-byte pictures (WAS: RE: Hexadecimal digits?)
Hi Philippe! When dealing with protocol specifications, there's often a need for characters like these, too, since hex byte pictures are unambiguous. I have a DEC dumb terminal around here somewhere which also uses them when debugging control characters. I suppose you could argue it's purely a formatting issue, though. If you've got some technical documentation reference of this terminal, it would be worth to give it as it will be used in technical documentations. It's a DEC VT320, and it's second hand like all of my dumb terminals, so I've never actually had the original manual. Upon closer inspection, it only appears to do hex-byte pictures for some C1 control pictures -- see http://vt100.net/built-in_glyphs.html. The VT220 did a similar thing, but more of it - no cuddly names for NEL and so on, plus some other chars have hex-byte pictures (probably as they were unassigned, but I am unsure) -- see http://vt100.net/docs/vt220-rm/table2-16b.html. I'm pretty sure my Wyse WY60's (and probably my WY85's too) do the same thing, but they're so buried under junk it's probably not worth pulling them out to check. What you suggest is something else: it's a proposal to encode technical characters similar to control images, or to glyphs of keys on a keyboard. It is not a script, but a handy collection of unique glyphs. I feel we're on the same wavelength now! :) Indeed, not a numeric system but technical symbols. In a similar technical domain, I don't know if the technical glyphs that are (were?) used on terminals for IBM MVS systems, are all encoded. I remember there was a sort of zig-zag arrow pointing to bottom left, as well as other symbols denoting the current state of the terminal, and a few others to denote editing operations in a screen mode: one had to mark a edited line with a symbol, and the terminal took care of remember where editing was allowed and performed, and once you had created a modified line, you pressed a Send key to get the screen updated with the new text after editing operations. Sounds very familiar :) Stuff like the stick figure (which on some terminals looked more like a cowboy), don't appear to be in unicode, but then again, were those characters ever actually a part of the IBM 3270 charsets, or were they simply internal only? This was more or less working in a way similar to the vi editor line-mode interface, except that it was screen-based rather than line-based. Looking at the original proposal by Frank da Cruz again after so long (http://www.funet.fi/pub/kermit/ucsterminal/hex.txt) reveals it cites many documents. Have a look at http://www.funet.fi/pub/kermit/ucsterminal/terminal-exhibits.pdf (~2.7MiB). BTW, Frank also had other proposals which included the IBM 3270 characters I think you were referring to (poke around the directory at http://www.funet.fi/pub/kermit/ucsterminal/).. I like the hex byte pictures proposal, and I'm seeing more reason to like it, the more I look into it.. Cheers! - Simon
RE: Hex-byte pictures (WAS: RE: Hexadecimal digits?)
BTW, Frank also had other proposals which included the IBM 3270 characters I think you were referring to (poke around the directory at http://www.funet.fi/pub/kermit/ucsterminal/).. I am not proposing to encode all terminal function indicators in Unicode. Else it would mean that we could as well standardize of those many icons found in toolbars of GUI applications. If these symbols appear in printed documentations, they are still snapshots of icons used in a particular program or device, and not intended to be part of interchanged documents... snip I wasn't either - just pointing it out. I agree entirely :) - Simon
Re: Hex-byte pictures (WAS: RE: Hexadecimal digits?)
From: Simon Butcher [EMAIL PROTECTED] BTW, Frank also had other proposals which included the IBM 3270 characters I think you were referring to (poke around the directory at http://www.funet.fi/pub/kermit/ucsterminal/).. I am not proposing to encode all terminal function indicators in Unicode. Else it would mean that we could as well standardize of those many icons found in toolbars of GUI applications. If these symbols appear in printed documentations, they are still snapshots of icons used in a particular program or device, and not intended to be part of interchanged documents... snip I wasn't either - just pointing it out. I agree entirely :) However, some symbols used as function indicators are now quite omnipotent, and easily recognized with a well-defined meaning or function. Some of them are encoded in Wingdings or Webdings, but some others may merit their encoding as symbols, like: - the note tip, - the attachment symbol (trombonne in French, Brobriefklammer in German, I don't know the term in English), - the flag symbol (added by users reading lists of items, like emails in an inbox folder or interesting products in a catalog for which a future action is required), or the visual glasses (to mark interesting items) - the dustbin (corbeille) used to mark items without interest, - religious symbols commonly found in newspapers in their classified necrologic ads. These ideographic symbols (with a semantic meaning) are more meaningful than various forms of dots, arrows and shapes. They will find more application within text files than: - conventional symbols used on geographic maps (not plain text) and that were encoded in *dings collections, - symbols used as road indicators (which are useful only in this context, and dependant of local usage, and require specific ink colors, and precize shape, and do not fit with the abstract character model) - national/regional flags and heraldic symbols (for the same reason that they require their ink colors and precise proportions and positioning to get their meaning).
Re: Hex-byte pictures (WAS: RE: Hexadecimal digits?)
Philippe Verdy verdy underscore p at wanadoo dot fr wrote: - the attachment symbol (trombonne in French, Brobriefklammer in German, I don't know the term in English), Paper clip. -Doug Ewell Fullerton, California http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/
