On Mon, Nov 14, 2011 at 1:52 PM, Naena Guru <[email protected]> wrote: > Having said all that, all is not so bad. I say transliterate to Latin and > make smartfonts. It is a proven success.
Really. Because every case I know of, differing font standards have made it a complete pain. For over a decade, Project Gutenberg had a partial copy of the Swedish bible in an unknown code-page. Eventually, someone took the time to figure out that it was mostly an old DOS code-page, and if that was true, the remaining characters that were displaying wrong must be curly quotes, and hand-transliterated it into Unicode. Unicode means I'll never have to do that, that text in Swedish or Sinhala or Russian will maintain its meaning no matter how the technology changes. There are thousands of standards based on the concept of plain text. This email has no font information attached; neither does Twitter, most IMs, cellphone texts, etc. Whatever you think of Unicode, smartfonts completely fail in so many environments. I'm tired of seeing üÔÏ ÓÏÏÂÝÅÎÉÅ Ñ×ÌÑÅÔÓÑ ÒÕÓÓËÉÊ ÑÚÙË where I should see Это сообщение является русский язык. My mail man has told me he wouldn't deliver http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Letter_to_Russia_with_krokozyabry.jpg . -- Kie ekzistas vivo, ekzistas espero.
