Peter C. wrote: >> font vendors are creating fonts that use Unicode, platform vendors >> (at least Mac and Windows -- Linux is too fractured a scene to >> make a general statement)
On Monday, December 6th, 2004 18:40Z Edward H. Trager va escriure: > > The really big, important applications and code libraries on Linux <snip> > all use Unicode. Recent Linux distributions [...] Novell/SuSE ship > with UTF-8 locales enabled by default right out of the box. Also, smaller projects like Indlinux is using also UTF-8 as a base, even if other characters sets like ISCII would be more logical. And to put a counterpoint, nowadays an appreciable part of the Indic softwares available on Windows still are using proprietary encodings (but things are changing here). The real point of Peter is that Windows NT internally coerce any string to be Unicode (more exactly UTF-16, and sometimes UCS-2 or UTF-32), and I read that current versions of MacOS do the same. Linux, repectful of its Unix origins, does not do that, it is completely encoding-neutral (provided the / is used as path separator); by the way Linux does not handle fonts, so it does not have to get involved in this debate. X11, which stands atop of Linux (or *BSD, or the Windows kernel), might be a bit more picky, but I understand it still accepts about everything 8-bit-based, and does not convert internally. This is actually a difference in design: open systems (as they were named) were designed from day one to be independant of the operationnal charsets, and UTF-8 is about one of them, most used nowadays. Linux and X11 inherited from this state of affairs (slightly more recent, Plan 9 did not, and it sticks to UTF-8 internallly.) On the other hand, Windows inherited (I understand from IBM, evolving from DOS) an attachment to a designated operationnal charset; once upon a time it was a big problem (and it still is in a number of cases), but with the advent of Windows NT which allows Unicode as the designated charset things are getting better. Of course the transition was harsher than the one to UTF-8 with open systems. However, you can still publish an "ANSI" application in 2004 for Windows. It is essentially the same as publishing an application for *nix which _requires_ a iso-8859-x or EUC-XX locale: not a sensible thing to do, but it may happen. Antoine
