On Tue, Mar 12, 2002 at 08:41:49PM -0800, Doug Ewell wrote: > This will > necessarily cause the encoding in Patrick's registry to be withdrawn, or > at least deprecated. How many people will switch immediately to the > sanctioned Unicode encoding? How quickly will existing software and > data be converted? Probably not right away, and the chances for a > timely conversion are less if the private-use encoding is particularly > successful, whether or not there are scripts available to help people > make the conversion.
I don't understand the complaint. The people will be encoding the data in some fashion. If they are using a private-use encoding, then they are prepared to use Unicode, if possibly not non-BMP characters. And since you obviously have clued-in people, they will at some point realize their encoding is obsolete and switch to standardized Unicode - probably a lot faster than people who have never heard of Unicode. How many people still use font encodings for their languages? The Cherokee still do, as far as I can tell - I've never seen a Unicode encoded Cherokee font (as opposed to a Unicode font with Cherokee.) It would be considerably harder for them to change to full Unicode - they would have make sure their systems would handle it, and create mapping tables for all the font encodings. Where as a Private-use solution merely has to create one font encoding. (While speaking of obsolete websites - www.unicode.org/pending/shavian/shavian.html still exists and says that Shavian has not been considered by WG2 yet. Since there are sites that link to it, it might be nice to forward it somewhere with more accurate information.) -- David Starner - [EMAIL PROTECTED] "It's not a habit; it's cool; I feel alive. If you don't have it you're on the other side." - K's Choice (probably refering to the Internet)
