On Fri, 2 Mar 2001, Markus Kuhn wrote:
> I was recently in contact with the initiator of project Gutenberg, and
> they are interested in updating their plaintext public domain literature
> format guidelines to UTF-8 and ISO 6429 SGR as soon as a few more
> editors to support entry comfortably are available.
I've been thinking about this (ISO 6429 SGR) and decided I don't like it.
Not one little bit. ISO 6429 is designed and specified as a transmittion
protocol not a storage format and it uses the escape character which is
_known_ to be unprintable by many programs and so would be corruped by
them.
I've also had a re-read of TR#7 (Plane 14 Tags) and I see it's not only
designed for language tags.
So I think this low cost formatting should use 'tag ascii' to spell out
the formatting in the style of HTML or nroff. As it's a distinct set
of characters you obviously don't need the '<>' or the prefix "cr-nl-dot"
and can just embed the characters like: Bhello/B
The rules need some thought, should the formatting go past EOL (no) a
space (IMO no) a NBS (IMO yes).
Potentially it could go into the regime of HTML/nroff, UCS already has
end of line and end of paragraph, but I don't think it should (there be
dragons!) the level of SGR is probably enough with the possible addition
of better colour support. Font size would be much too far IMO.
Stripping is simple, any TagPhobic application will do it.
Editing can be the same as for UCS language tags.
> Markus
--
Rob. (Robert de Bath <http://poboxes.com/rdebath>)
<rdebath @ poboxes.com> <http://www.cix.co.uk/~mayday>
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Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels
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