To introduce a new and irrelevent tangent...
On Wed, Apr 18, 2001 at 12:11:00PM +0900, Tomohiro KUBOTA wrote:
> If lack of proportional font were such very annoying thing for them,
> why typewriter was so widely used?
>
>From the 1950s or 60s there actually were proportionally-spacing
typewriters in common use, such as the IBM Executive. Typing was done
in the normal way, but backspacing was more interesting.
David Starner - [EMAIL PROTECTED] - wrote:
> Typewriters are a pragmatic thing. Until recently, they were the
> only way to produce decent print (i.e. not handwritten) quickly and
> cheaply. Every so often, I find a book in the library, usually in
> the linguistics section, where it was typed up on a typewriter and
> all the accents were added in by hand.
>
Typewriters in some countries had accents on dead keys, like the Czech
typewriter I bought at a secondhand shop for five dollars and wrote
most of my undergraduate papers on.
By the way, the sentiment that Unicode is only for GUI font rendering
and typesetting is a misconception, albeit one that is held by many of
its proponents. In fact it is a plain-text standard, period, that is
only slightly more hostile to terminal emulation than to any other form
of expression. The fact that combining diacritics come after the base
character rather than before is the main stumbling block for terminal
emulators, which operate in realtime and don't have the luxury of
lookahead. However, the "deprecated" status of line and box-drawing
characters can no longer be claimed because Unicode 3.1 adds tons of
them, mostly for math, but some expressly for terminal emulation.
See:
ftp://kermit.columbia.edu/kermit/ucsterminal/ucsterminal.txt
- Frank
-
Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels
Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/lists/
