> For example, plain text doesn't have information on typeface.
> Thus, XTerm can display A-M using Roman and N-Z using Italic
> and it is not wrong, though it is "dirty". However, confusing
> - Latin and Greek letters
> - "Morning" and "Morgen"
> - Chinese and Japanese letters
> are wrong.
"Morning" and "Morgen" are not typestting entities.
We are not talking about lanugage entities but about typesetting entities.
Putting the 'A' of latin, cyrillic and greek at the same codepoint
would not have necessarily been wrong. It just wasn't done, because
there are so few alphabetic characters, and lining them up in different
codespaces makes it easier to implement sorting and much more.
> > Don't use so-called plain text when you wish to make font
> > distinctions within the text. This has been the reply all
> > along, and will continue to be the reply.
>
> As I said again and again, I say No. Study Japanese or Chinese,
> use them as your first language, and live in Japanese or Chinese
> community for long years first, if you want to direct such a thing
> to native speakers. Discussions cannot change Japanese culture
> or behavior of Japanese consumers.
Nor can your assertions change reality. Reality is that I have a lot of
mixed sino-japanese plain text on my computer, because I use both
languages daily. Such text does look uglier with when saved as and
displayed as utf-8 with Mule-UCS than it looks when treated with iso-2022
by normal Mule. This is because some different-style fonts are mixed and
used for the wrong characters. Nevertheless
(1) this mixed text is ugly but perfectly readable even now
(2) this mixed text would look quite nice if we had a unified font with
one single glyph style. Nobody in East Asia except perhaps a few
typography detail fetishists would feel uncomfortable.
(3) for the detail fetishists, it is possible to use language tagging
and font tagging
In general I think we should in the future be heading for more unification
also in font styles. It is simply not true that people in East Asia
attach great importance to seeing fonts in one particular style which is
particular to their country. National particularity of font styles is a
phenomenon of the 20th century, and it is fading away, as lots of new
styles are being developped internationally. Some people feel uneasy
about this tendency and fear that their nation (which means really only a
certain circle of experts) is losing control of its culture. This is
why the debate has become so ideologized in Japan, with books like
"Dennou shaikai no naka no Nihongo" and of course many more extreme ones
warning about a loss of control over Japanese culture. This is
of course a debate that shouldn't concern us that much on this list.
It wouldn't really, if it wasn't for the occasional FUD to which it
periodically gives rise.
-phm
-
Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels
Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/lists/
