D. Starner wrote at 10:07 PM on Monday, February 2, 2004: >> I hope Apple re-thinks this, because it makes PUA useless in plain text. > >That's because it is. Without further specification, the PUA is completely >ambigious.
So you're saying PUA is only useful for rich or marked-up text? >> end >> users get to control display behavior by re-assigning PUA code points or >> de-installing fonts, whereas they have no control and no visual >> information if the OS just gives up. > >You can binary patch your OS to fix this behaviour. Can you tell us exactly how to do this for Panther? Or another OS? >That's about as >reasonable as reencoding your data or removing fonts until the system >pseudo-randomly picks the right font. It is a trivial piece of code (and a very fast executing one) to re-name all files with cuneiform names on my computer and to re-encode their content. Plus I have only one PUA-based font installed on my computer. >> So, for example, in Jaguar I had been using a PUA-based cuneiform font >> for file and folder names, which I found to be very nice and very useful; > >Nice and useful? At least in my experiance, giving my folders names I can't >write from the keyboard, I enter cuneiform from the keyboard. >that can't be displayed in many of the fonts on my system, So you wouldn't use Japanese or Arabic characters in file names if you only had a couple fonts of each installed? >is at best an affection. This is not an affectation, it is a strong conviction. Doing ongoing research in 8 or 9 ancient scripts I have always been a strong proponent of native character set usage; transliteration can be an adjunct, but never a substitute for serious work. >Using PUA characters for filenames is unportable It's non-portable for anything. I'm not interchanging these files, and don't plan to until cuneiform is encoded and I convert them all over to the final encoding in a few seconds. Meanwhile I get to keep working privately on my applications. >and it's a marginal use, even among the uses of PUA characters. >Given the choice between the private use area working right in wordprocessors >and text editors or it working in filenames, I'd pick the first, and not >be real sorry about disrupting the second. The choices are not mutually exclusive. Jaguar did both, and it worked; Panther has taken something away. Now if the garbage characters in some fonts, that Deborah Goldsmith mentions in another email, actually caused real problems for users under Jaguar, that would be a different story. But so far I have not heard of any mentioned so far. But even there, that would seem to me to be a font vendor problem that should not dictate OS policy. It should be the other way around. The onus should be on font architects to remove garbage from publicly released fonts. Respectfully, Dean A. Snyder Assistant Research Scholar Manager, Digital Hammurabi Project Computer Science Department Whiting School of Engineering 218C New Engineering Building 3400 North Charles Street Johns Hopkins University Baltimore, Maryland, USA 21218 office: 410 516-6850 cell: 717 817-4897 www.jhu.edu/digitalhammurabi
