[Just a quick note to everyone that, I’ve just subscribed to this public list, and will look into this ongoing Mongolian-related discussion once I’ve mentally recovered from this week’s UTC stress. :)]
Best, 梁海 Liang Hai https://lianghai.github.io > On Jan 17, 2019, at 11:06, Asmus Freytag via Unicode <unicode@unicode.org> > wrote: > > On 1/17/2019 9:35 AM, Marcel Schneider via Unicode wrote: >>> [quoted mail] >>> >>> But the French "espace fine insécable" was requested long long before >>> Mongolian was discussed for encodinc in the UCS. The problem is that the >>> initial rush for French was made in a period where Unicode and ISO were >>> competing and not in sync, so no agreement could be found, until there was >>> a decision to merge the efforts. Tge early rush was in ISO still not using >>> any character model but a glyph model, with little desire to support >>> multiple whitespaces; on the Unicode side, there was initially no desire to >>> encode all the languages and scripts, focusing initially only on trying to >>> unify the existing vendor character sets which were already implemented by >>> a limited set of proprietary vendor implementations (notably IBM, >>> Microsoft, HP, Digital) plus a few of the registered chrsets in IANA >>> including the existing ISO 8859-*, GBK, and some national standard or de >>> facto standards (Russia, Thailand, Japan, Korea). >>> This early rush did not involve typographers (well there was Adobe at this >>> time but still using another unrelated technology). Font standards were >>> still not existing and were competing in incompatible ways, all was a mess >>> at that time, so publishers were still required to use proprietary software >>> solutions, with very low interoperability (at that time the only "standard" >>> was PostScript, not needing any character encoding at all, but only >>> encoding glyphs!) >> >> Thank you for this insight. It is a still untold part of the history of >> Unicode. > This historical summary does not square in key points with my own > recollection (I was there). I would therefore not rely on it as if gospel > truth. > > In particular, one of the key technologies that brought industry partners to > cooperate around Unicode was font technology, in particular the development > of the TrueType Standard. I find it not credible that no typographers were > part of that project :). > > Covering existing character sets (National, International and Industry) was > an (not "the") important goal at the time: such coverage was understood as a > necessary (although not sufficient) condition that would enable data > migration to Unicode as well as enable Unicode-based systems to process and > display non-Unicode data (by conversion). > > The statement: "there was initially no desire to encode all the languages and > scripts" is categorically false. > > (Incidentally, Unicode does not "encode languages" - no character encoding > does). > > What has some resemblance of truth is that the understanding of how best to > encode whitespace evolved over time. For a long time, there was a confusion > whether spaces of different width were simply digital representations of > various metal blanks used in hot metal typography to lay out text. As the > placement of these was largely handled by the typesetter, not the author, it > was felt that they would be better modeled by variable spacing applied > mechanically during layout, such as applying indents or justification. > > Gradually it became better understood that there was a second use for these: > there are situations where some elements of running text have a gap of a > specific width between them, such as a figure space, which is better treated > like a character under authors or numeric formatting control than something > that gets automatically inserted during layout and rendering. > > Other spaces were found best modeled with a minimal width, subject to > expansion during layout if needed. > > > > There is a wide range of typographical quality in printed publication. The > late '70s and '80s saw many books published by direct photomechanical > reproduction of typescripts. These represent perhaps the bottom end of the > quality scale: they did not implement many fine typographical details and > their prevalence among technical literature may have impeded the > understanding of what character encoding support would be needed for true > fine typography. At the same time, Donald Knuth was refining TeX to restore > high quality digital typography, initially for mathematics. > > However, TeX did not have an underlying character encoding; it was using a > completely different model mediating between source data and final output. > (And it did not know anything about typography for other writing systems). > > Therefore, it is not surprising that it took a while and a few false starts > to get the encoding model correct for space characters. > > Hopefully, well complete our understanding and resolve the remaining issues. > > A./ > > > > > > >
