Stewart Stremler wrote:
Actually, if you wanted to prove your superiority, put the glyphs into
something like Dasher and let people play.
How would that help? That's font-selection, innit?
http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/dasher/
It's a system for entering words into interface-deprived devices.
It turns out that Chinese is giving them fits:
How would Chinese Dasher work?
"We would not go directly for the ideograms, since there are too many of
them. We have to build up sentences using a sequence of symbols each of
which has small information content. "
A better coding to allow them to put together glyphs would be a big help.
I believe that was necessary to fit a useful subset completely inside
UTF-16 when it was required to only use 2 bytes. Now that there are
mechanisms for creating pairs of UTF-16 symbols which represent one
Unicode code point, this is no longer necessary.
That would be "yes", I imagine. :)
Hm....
Okay. I'll have to ponder this for a bit.
I believe that the original constraint was the fact that Windows used
wide strings (ie "String" == "array of byte pairs"). Thus, there was no
ability to move beyond 65536 glyphs because Windows couldn't cope with
the fact that a single glyph might be 2 *or* 4 bytes.
However, the fact that Windows demanded wide strings helped a lot. An
entire generation of programmers has grown up without necessarily
thinking that "String" == "char[]" == "array of single bytes".
-a
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