> But I don't want to have the obligation to "know" 65536 signs to > express what I want to express. I'm sorry, but I think that the > main majority (remember that for latin1/latin2 accented letters > are just variants so need less "user memory" than plain different > characters) can do with (less than) 256 signs blocks, and switch > fonts when "speaking" about special things (the switch can be > automatic by the way). As far as TeX is concerned, all the control > codepoints (positions) are useless in the fonts. There is still > availbale room even if for the latin1 encoded tfm built for (next) > kerTeX from PostScript core.
there are currently 0x10ffff+1 codepoints (1114112), not 65536, but only 23669 + the large chinese blocks are currently defined. but anyway, i think you are missing the point. every one of those codepoints is used, or was used in human written communication. the fact that you or i probablly don't know them all is beside the point entirely. there are 600000 words in the oxford english dictionary. i don't know them all. let's suppose i had the power to eliminate all the ones that i don't know. wouldn't that be a horrible idea? then i would not be able to learn any new words. odious. so with unicode. if you strip out all the languages you don't know by restricting yourself to the latin1 codepoints [0, 256), then you can't easily add, say, greek or sumerian codepoints should you or anyone else need them. since, as you can see, there is a 1:1 identity mapping between latin1 and unicode codepoints [0, 256), i don't see why one wouldn't give oneself the option to increase this subset to cover more ground. i use alphas, arrows, math symbols, etc. quite often in code. and even more often when i used to use tex. it's really quite a drag to read \alpha instead of “α.” > Does a whole Unicode "Times-Roman" font makes sense? Ideograms in > "Times-Roman"? i get confused on terms. i think the right term is typeface. extended fonts collections of a given typeface covering very wide sections of unicode do exist and are sold by the major font vendors. i don't think that it's too hard to imagine that one can make most symbols look compatable enough. in fact, i'm using a font with ~32000 glyphs on my plan 9 terminal right now. and there's no penalty for having that many glyphs. it just means that my font file as a couple hundred subfonts. these are only open if needed. typically only 3 subfonts are open at any one time. - erik
