On Sun, 29 Sep 2002 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > Anyway, what I hate is to divide people into two classes, people who > > don't need additional files/settings and people who need them. > > Japanese users were always forced to read books to configure softwares > > to be able to handle Japanese. I strongly hope that Unicode will > > equalize peoples in the world. To achieve this, we should not spoil > > the advantage of Unicode to ISO-2022 --- the unified character set --- > > by spliting the code space and saying "this code space is needed, that > > is optional". > > Im of agreement; I think the ability to display every character > at least once is fundamental. Right to Left writing order also, > because its mandatory for many languages. (TopDown, however, > seems less than mandatory, and it introduces complexities such > as placement of small kana in a character cell, etc... )
Top-to-bottom isn't necessary if an alternative is possible, as in the case of Japanese, which can be left-to-right (and is normally on computers already). (Small kana is just an issue of additional glyphs for use in vertical text, rather than horizontal text.) There are a few scripts that are top-to-bottom, with no real and normal alternative, such as the classical Mongolian script (top-to-bottom, left-to-right), that a decision will have to be made over. (On the other hand, in this particular example, Cyrillic could be substituted for writing Mongolian, if the goal is just simple contemporary IT usage.) > The minimum font needed to handle unicode may be large, but > I dont think its unmanageable. It may even be required to > *read* the source code. (does anyone else put UTF-8 in their > C files? Works great afaict) In the case of CJK and basic display, 18x18 is extravagant--16x16 is sufficient for daily purposes, and in extreme cases, 12x12 or 10x10 could even be proposed, but they are very very illegible. Further trimmings in size could be arrived at by reducing the repetoire down to just a combination of the major commonly used legacy character sets, GB2312, Big5, JIS X 0208, and KS X 1001 (or we can wait and see what conclusions the IRG is coming up with for a minimal set). Thomas Chan [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
