Saluton, On 7/6/11, Henrique Peron <hpe...@terra.com.br> wrote: > > Em 05/07/2011 18:25, Rugxulo escreveu: >> >> Honestly, I very rarely use only Latin-3 (913), so please don't waste >> 500 hours on my account! ;-) It's very low priority. > > My friend, it is always a pleasure. I do hope that end-users have as > much fun using "my" codepages and keyboard layouts as I have while > making the necessary researches and working on them. :)
It's cool to me to see when other languages work. It just seems almost magical. And of course I consider compilers a similar breed of magic. (But it can be complicated!) > ISO 8859: good part of the job is already done (the codepages) - for a > long time already, by the way. All I need now is to work on distinct > versions of all the keyboard layouts which could work with ISO > codepages; if it takes 500 hours to get the job done, don't worry. I > won't bill you. ;-) No pressure!! "Little by little does the trick." > Latin-1 with Euro, on ISO, is "Latin-9", a.k.a. ISO 8859-15. Which is completely logical (facepalm)! >> You are a one-man marching band!! You've done such good work here for us! >> ;-) > Thank you for your words (on the good work) but we know that it is not > quite a "one-man marching band" - without Aitor's KEYB/KC/KLIB/DISPLAY > and Eric's MODE, I couldn't have done anything. hehehe!! :) Okay, yes, forgot about Eric and Aitor, heheh. Yes, of course they've done tons, Jim too (and Bart and Japheth and Blair and Steve and Jeremy and Tom and Stefan and Rene and Bernd and ...). > Besides, there is this one case which I didn't participate in: support > for japanese. This one is not "my child". It was teamwork directly > between Aitor and a japanese end-user. Not only I don't even remotely > have knowledge on japanese kanji (so to work on japanese codepages) but > I also don't have the necessary hardware to test it. Nor do most of us, which is an annoying problem (no suitable hardware). It's almost insurmountable when you can't find any way to test. > It turns out that, when/if there's a korean or chinese FreeDOS user, I > won't be able to help him at all. I'm seriously curious about how > Johnson Lam deals with that, by the way. No idea. I almost would suggest to just let CJK users handle it themselves since it's so complex. I mean, they understand their needs better than us! Or perhaps they'll chime in here eventually. >> BTW, last I heard, Eli Z. was working on bidi editing in GNU Emacs. > > Hmmmm... I don't know Eli Z. nor GNU Emacs. Just a moment. Let me google > it. (Sandwatch rolling) > > Oh, ok! Great! Interesting! However, I didn't find any mention to > "BIDI", "arabic", "hebrew", "right", "left", etc. on his webpage. > Perhaps BIDI is a work in progress, as you said. Here's what he said on news://comp.os.msdos.djgpp (May 27): "[M]ost of my scarce resources are taken anyway (adding bidirectional editing support to Emacs)." He does (apparently?) live in Israel (.il), so presumably he speaks Hebrew (right to left). Sadly, I don't, so I can't help him. Note that I have no idea if the DJGPP port of Emacs will ever support it (or ever be updated again), honestly, but he did just finish / package 23.3 for us recently. Though GNU Emacs in DOS doesn't really "display" anything special, it just fakes it via "c>" for "c with circumflex". > Mined has support for "poor man's BIDI" (Thomas Wolff's, the developer, > own words). Yes, Mined has lots of good stuff. It's a true gem for FreeDOS. >>> UTF-8 is best suited for languages written with the latin alphabet >> >> I just don't know if such a bias really is universally accepted or >> not. > > All I said is that UTF-8 is best suited for languages written with the > latin (also cyrillic, greek, georgian, armenian) alphabet; Yes, UTF-8 vs. UCS-2 both have advantages and disadvantages. I wasn't trying to be polemic, sorry, just saying, we don't need 1000 different Unicode variants or we're no better off, right?? I mean, if *nix had its way, everybody would use UTF-8, but that's not the case (Windows uses UTF-16). > Too late. I prepared the vietnamese VISCII and keyboard layout for > FreeDOS a long time ago, as a matter of fact. :) Good stuff! Too bad I can't read it. ;-) There actually used to be a fairly sizable community around here (not including me, I'm not a member, heh), but I don't know where they went. In other words, I can't grab 'em to test for ya (doh). BTW, not to get too off-topic, but whenever I want to see what a language looks like, I check here (1697 languages, wow). Easily one of the coolest sites on the Internet, even if you're not religious. http://www.christusrex.org/www1/pater/JPN-vietnam.html <off-topic> The computer programmer's alternative is here: http://www.99-bottles-of-beer.net/ </off-topic> >> For good or bad, it's long been assumed by most developers that >> everybody has VGA or SVGA or newer. (With "modern" OSes, it's worse: >> gfx acceleration, OpenGL, DirectX 9, etc.) > > Well then, let's go graphics! :) Well, that's what Blocek and Foxtype have done! :-) I even found an old Euphoria program (polyglot) that did similar, though it was confusing. >> I'm not sure 8086 is really a feasible target anymore (though I'm not >> actively suggesting dropping it). But do such retrocomputing people >> even want Unicode support? I doubt it. Like you said, they're probably >> happy enough (or even English only!). > > It seems you're thinking on a scenario where all retrocomputing people > live in the USA (or UK, or Australia). More specifically, I was thinking of Jim Leonard (American), Mike Brutman (American), Mike Chambers (American?). Those are the three 8086 users that pop into my head. Oh, and Jason Knight (American). Together they've written MonoTone, mTCP, leetIRC, and Paku Paku (among other things). I know there are others, esp. in other countries. (Europe seems to have very high numbers of Internet users, esp. programmers.) But I couldn't name any off the top of my head! ;-) > Let me give you an example: many > video BIOSes in computers here in Brazil, back on those days, used two > distinct (both proprietary) national standards (Abicomp and BRASCII) in > order to provide support for the portuguese language even on regular CGA > or Hercules displays. Therefore, it is not a matter of wanting but a > matter of needing Unicode support. While BRASCII was almost identical to > ISO 8859-1, Abicomp was an encoding completely different from anything > else. It gets worse: many cheque printers (if not all) here in Brazil > use either one or the other of those two encodings to this day. They > even come with DOS drivers! Yes, I know, it gets complicated. It's just that Unicode is so damn HUGE!!! You can't just halfway support it either. > Naturally, when I talk about "need for Unicode" even for a simple > language like portuguese (from the script's point-of-view), I'm > considering an all-or-nothing scenario where there would be no regular > codepages but only Unicode. Sure, let's get full Unicode, multitasking, 32-bit (or 64-bit?) kernel with full compatibility for old stuff. And let's be able to bootstrap the entire thing. Plus add networking, USB, BluRay, ZFS, etc. Of course, best case scenario, I guess that might take 100+ years! ;-)) I know I know, one step at a time .... ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ All of the data generated in your IT infrastructure is seriously valuable. Why? It contains a definitive record of application performance, security threats, fraudulent activity, and more. Splunk takes this data and makes sense of it. IT sense. And common sense. http://p.sf.net/sfu/splunk-d2d-c2 _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
