Hi,
At Tue, 17 Apr 2001 23:03:14 +0100,
Markus Kuhn <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> In Europe,
> plaintext is just able to represent the output of antique typewriters
> and teletypers with very restricted glyph repertoirs and no style
> variation, not even proportional fonts. In Japan on the other hand, what
> formatted plaintext provides is very close to what proper typography
> provides.
Hmm, it is not very true.
Plain text must be _logically_ same to the original. For example,
"Hoffman" in the original text must not be displayed as "Hofmann",
though it has the same meaning regardless of usage of fixed or
proportional and "ff" ligature. Han Variants is like distinction
between "Hoffman" and "Hofmann".
On the other hand, "doublewidth" is, you are right. Strictly speaking,
"width" is not a property of plain text. I insist it is needed for
XTerm because of compatibility to the de-facto standard in CJK world
since 8bit computer age.
(see http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/2001-01/msg00148.html for
a small brief list of such de-facto standards.)
I imagine the concept of "doublewidth" was invented because computer
was developed in Latin Alphabet world and Japanese support was developed
as a extension to such computers (thus, Japanese computers can display
both Latin and Japanese). If computer were developed first in Japan,
the concept of "column" woule be like nowadays "doublewidth" and
all "foreign" characters such as Latin and Cyrillic would be
displayed in such "column" (looks like doublewidth today). Europeans
might invent "narrowwidth" for more readable Latin expression when
computer were "imported" from Japan. Well, just a relativist's view.
(Just FYI: Japanese typesetting sometimes use proportional font and
kerning, though Ideograph are almost always fixed-width. Please refer
Ken Lunde's book for detail.)
I have no idea what impression your word "very restricted" implies.
I imagine Latin alphabet people have long tradition of typewriter.
If lack of proportional font were such very annoying thing for them,
why typewriter was so widely used? (I have even read a journal which
use typewritter (courier?) for typesetting.)
---
Tomohiro KUBOTA <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
http://www.debian.or.jp/~kubota/
"Introduction to I18N"
http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/intro-i18n/
-
Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels
Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/lists/
