On Fri, 10 Mar 2000 13:53:15 -0500, Clarence Verge wrote:
> Marie Fischer wrote:
>> On Thu, 9 Mar 2000, Samuel W. Heywood wrote:
>> > I thought about that, but was afraid that someone would complain about
>> > the posting of a graphics file to the mailing list. I think the
>> > characters are adequately described in the text.
>> I think so too
> Sorry, I must have been unclear in my post suggesting the graphics.
> Sams' description was perfectly good - especially since I could see the
> characters exactly as described.
> What I meant was since I, and probably a lot of others, don't know what
> all the different character sets look like and since the names are mostly
> meaningless, it would be nice if there was a graphic available somewhere
> that showed all of the common sets on one page, each with their label.
> This way, neither the generating or viewing device gets in the way of the
> discussion. <g>
This sounds like a very good idea, as far as the basic concept goes. I
don't know what you should want to use as "labels" for the characters.
The problem with labeling the characters with their corresponding ALT + NUM
numbers would be confusing to most of us because there is no single standard
for such characters. The problem with labeling the characters by the actual
names of the characters is that various different cultures use different
names for the characters of the alphabet, even when they speak the same
language. An English speaking Canadian child does not say his ABC's in the
same way as an American child. The different cultures pronounce the names
of the characters differently. Another problem is that various kinds of
accent marks have different names in different languages. I think it
might be more helpful to describe accent marks over vowels by use of symbols
such as "/","\","^",and ".." for umlauts, or for any vowel character having
two dots over it. What do we call the French language character that looks
like a C with a little curly thingy under it? Many of us, myself included,
do not even know the names of some characters used in our own respective
languages. One list member described a certain character as "the one used
to start laws". I think he was referring to a character typically used to
signal the beginning of a new paragraph. I don't know the name of it.
If anyone knows of a good reference document on the web that provides a
listing of all the characters producible by all the various code pages and
the names given to these characters in many various languages, please post
the URL.
That would really help.
Sam Heywood
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