Doug Ewell wrote: > This ASCII-only requirement for submitting papers for a Unicode Conference > continues to amuse me. I should think that UTF-8 at least would be > acceptable.
At the risk of being viewed as a humorlous drudge, the ASCII-only requirement is for submitting *ABSTRACTS* for the conference. This is for the convenience of the conference organizer, who has to pull together abstracts submitted from all over and email them out to the review committee with very short turnaround times. I think we can all agree that email handling of Unicode (UTF-8 or UTF-16), or for that matter any other character set besides ASCII, is not exactly what one could call seamless or without problems as yet. And the result would just be various trashed abstracts that would require back-and-forth cycles between authors, organizer and reviewers to try to get straightened out. As it is, the review committee already deals with plenty of %2D %EC type trash in the abstracts as it is. So this is just a matter of practicality, given the application to hand. The *PAPERS* for the conference can be submitted in pdf form or other printable forms, and authors are free to use Unicode to their heart's content, as long as the conference organizer has the capability of printing the result legibly. James Kass footnoted: > From the announcement: > > (Close to the beginning of the text...) > > > > The Unicode Standard has become the foundation > > > for all modern text processing. > > Irony can be a little bit funny and a little bit sad. > Perhaps we should just agree to keep in mind the eternal caveat to that claim: --except in email, where ASCII rules --Ken ;-)
