Dear Philippe, [ I write to the list, since there is no point sending two posts. Internet is full enough of errant SMTP mails anyway. ]
On Wednesday, September 29, 2004 17:42, Philippe Verdy va escriure: > From: "Antoine Leca" >> Just a side point: French cannot be fully addressed with Latin 1. > > True, due to the missing (but rare) oe or OE ligature Rare? "beef", "heart", "eye", "egg" are anything but rare words, methinks. Even in French. Or do you mean 'rare' as meaning 'strange'? Also, it becomes more and more important to have the euro sign. > Anyway, no French users actually complain of this omission: Ah! So there is a lot of people, myself and some well-known here Canadians included, that do not qualify as "French users", according to your rules. > in addition, French keyboards typically never include a > key to enter these ligatures, I mentionned this point in the part you snipped. I can also add that the usual keyboards in France do not have a possibility to accentuate capitals letters, so as a result usage is now to left them out, with a corresponding misunderstandings in all-caps texts. > The "ae" ligature is used in French, but not in the common language > (I think it is used only in some technical juridic or religious > terms, inherited from Latin, or in some medical and botanic jargon): > I can't even remember of one French word that uses it; This is off-topic, but a current orthography of "et c�tera" in French uses the � ligature (which is a letter according to Unicode names, and which is collating after z in Catalan, Croatian, Magyar, Romanian, Slovak, Slovenian...) > With those considerations, would a software that only supports the > ISO-8859-1 character set be considered "not ready" for French usage? > I think not, and even today most French texts are coded with this > limited subset, without worrying about the absence of a rare > ligature, whose absence is easily infered by readers. "Easily"? Well well well. Judging by the difficulty of some young children to make the distinction between c�ur and coexister, I do not buy the argument. Similarly, it was possible in 1973 to consider that ISO 646-FR (AFNOR NF Z 62010) was sufficient for French usage, with the insertion of a backspace between the vowel and the ^. However, computers are now a bit more powerful, perhaps we can do ourselves a favour and drop those legacy constraints (and it is particularly important for the usual posters in this forum to avoid giving wrong impressions/informations to the newcomers in i18n, I believe). Cordialement, Antoine
