From: "Doug Ewell" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > I guarantee you that creating a new 8-bit encoding specific to the > language(s) you are dealing with, and getting fonts developed for that > encoding, and trying to exchange data in this new encoding with others, > will cause more problems for the university than working with Unicode.
For your university yes, most probably, but for local native users of the script I would disagree, there's a radically different usage and need pattern between interchanged data in a heterogeneous environment, and local usage. I'm not advocating for any private definition of a new 8-bit charset. But I find nothing wrong if a country standardization body wants to promote its own charset to help increase the stability of orthographs, and define a stable subset appropriate for a language. If such charsets gets to a national standard; it will give incitations to font makers so that they make the few additions needed in their Unicode fonts. That's something which seems impossible to ask to font makers when they are exposed to tens of thousands of combinations of letters and diacritics: unless there's a well known standard that exposes the needed combinations, many of them will remain untested and they won't feel that the addition is necessary to support users communities in some countries, because they will feel, that there's no market incitation to make these corrections. See how GB18030, whose support for commercial usages was made mandatory, helped to improve the support of larger charsets than the many incomplete ones that were initially made for limited usages badly targeted for China. Since then, the support of Chinese with Unicode has been considerably enhanced on most platforms. National or regional official standards are a great help to improve the correct support of languages. This does not limit the development of Unicode for interchanges, even if locally the data can be processed more easily by smaller subsets. I would say the same for other subsets already registered with ISO/IEC 10646, such as European ones: subsets with multiple levels help understanding which characters should have a priority support for a relevant market. Microsoft made a similar initiative by pushing foundries to support at least the WGL4 subset in their fonts. Unicode will remain the worldwide interoperability solution, but I see nothing wrong in regional development initiatives.
