On Jan 9, 2012, at 10:17, John Gilmore wrote: > > o 'ffl', 'fi' and the like are typesetters' ligatures, usually found > only in 'expert' fonts and not having their own code points, probably > because needs for them vary from font to font. > Yes. The needs were mechanical because of contention between type slugs. I was surprised to learn, circa 1987, that MS Word of that era required the author to specify those ligatures rather than making it a function of the rendering filter. I don't know if it's better now. I suspect that few word processors were ever coupled to mechanical typesetters; the IBM Selectric might have been kind of an exception.
> As I have had occasion to note before, we have good zArchitecture, > z/OS and HLASM support for UNICODE availablegto us; and it is time we > all started using it, at least in new undertakings. > How well do zArchitecture, z/OS and HLASM support UTF-8, which is the norm in various quarters? I suppose that can be considered another output filter: UCS-16 <-> UTF-8. z/OS? Can I write my JCL and utility control statements in Unicode? HLASM? Can I write my assembler source in Unicode? Accidents of history. While the normal code set for text on the PDP-6 was 7-bit ASCII, most system calls required arguments in 6-bit ASCII subset. z/OS is in a similar position with respect to Unicode versus EBCDIC. -- gil
