On Fri, Jul 11, 2003 at 09:57:46AM +0200, Manuel Reiter wrote:
> > Could you clarify what this approach is ? In particular, could it be
> > used as a general solution to the problem we're all having over
> > "accented" (or more generally, non-ascii) characters, or is it a
> > set-up-dependent thing which couldn't be trusted to transfer,
> > as abc, to other peoples' machines ?
> 
> The approach was to write some postscript codeto display accented
> characters not present in Adobe's ISOLatin1Encoding by basically printing
> the base character and the isolated accent, which are both present, on top
> of each other.
> 
> I also added some little modifications to jcabc2ps, so that it interprets
> sequences like, e.g., '\vc' as 'put a hacek on the letter c' and inserts
> the appropriate postscript in its output.
> 
> The postscript part should, as far as I can tell, not depend on any
> specific output devices but be fairly 'portable postscript', if such a
> beast indeed exists. ;-) For other output methods than postscript, this
> will be of no help whatsoever, of course.

It could still be helpful, though. If this gives us programs that will
have a general way of getting accents printed, that will hopefully
clarify their use (and thereby encourage people away from "it works on
my machine" character-set-dependent numbers) and, as you say, hopefully
end up as Standard. ... What other output methods would it affect ?
The big GUI apps, I suppose, that need to display on-screen. And print -
does Barfly, for example, print via postscript ?


> The right way to represent accented characters in abc should of course be
> addressed in the upcoming standard and the code changed accordingly, once
> a standard way of doing it is decided on. At that point, one could start
> to expect (or at least hope) other applications to handle those sequences
> or at least ignore them gracefully (my proposition would be to just print
> the base char, if you can't draw the accent - that's also why I'd prefer a
> notation like e.g. '\,c' for c with cedille to single character notations
> like '\c').

Yes.

-- 
Richard Robinson
"The whole plan hinged upon the natural curiosity of potatoes" - S. Lem

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