One more comment: > The idea of Plain Text is not anything practical but was used as a means of > attracting supporters, who for the most part hadn't had any experience with > computers.
I received Naenu's message as plain text -- that is, as character codes without accompanying font or layout information -- and was able to paste the plain text into an application which allowed me to select a font and see Sinhala. I don't know how this becomes "the idea of plain text is not practical." Sure, you need a font that contains Sinhala glyphs and a rendering engine that can display the glyphs correctly. That's true for any script. > The following line is Unicode text: > මේ අකුරු ලියා ඇත්තේ යුනිකෝඩ් අකුරෙනි. > > I bet most of you see it as a row of Character-not-found glyph. Some would > see it in the non-Latin script, but yet separated into meaningless components > that go to make letters. Some versions of some operating systems are behind the times and don't include adequate fonts or rendering support for Sinhala. That says nothing about the viability of Unicode, nor about the motives of its creators. > So, the headache you are talking about within Latin becomes a tumor that > makes you insane when outside the SBCS. I can't display Sinhala text encoded in an 8-bit standard. My operating systems don't support it. -- Doug Ewell | Thornton, Colorado, USA | RFC 5645, 4645, UTN #14 www.ewellic.org | www.facebook.com/doug.ewell | @DougEwell
