On Sat, 3 Sep 2005, Han-Wen Nienhuys wrote: > A. LilyPond actually _does_ support the Latin1 character set, as Latin1 > and Unicode coincide on the first 256 codepoints.
I don't quite see that. If I put an e-acute (a byte of decimal value #233) in a LilyPond file, it is skipped -- it does not appear in the PDF output. I have to put in the unicode equivalent, which is the two bytes #195 #169 (where 169 = 233 - 64) in order for LilyPond to give me an e-acute. USASCII and unicode coincide on the first 128 codepoints, but from what I can see, Latin1 and unicode do not correspond on byte values #128 to #255. > B. LilyPond does not support Latin1 encoding. This is because > 1. It's not possible to detect the encoding of a file. Supporting > alternate encodings implies that users have to specify the encoding via > the command line. This is error-prone, and leads to confusion for newbies. Not via the command line. Via a command at the top of the LilyPond file such as \unicode or \latin1, or some Scheme command (or even #!latin1 or %!latin1 in a time-honoured tradition). Having to insert a command for including english.ly and for setting paper size to letter is error-prone and confusing to newbies -- I know, I'm a newbie. A command for identifying a file's character-encoding type is no worse. > 2. If we do latin1, why should we not do latin2. And if we do latin1 > and 2, why not Big5? EBCDIC? UTF-16? tibetan-iso-8bit? Where does it > stop? Well, I have to admit it's hard to argue with that. Despite the fact that I think that a lot of North Americans would like to have the direct Latin1 availability to which they have become accustomed, I know that at the least, Eastern Europeans would also want Latin2 and Latin4. Unicode only provides a way of specifying character codes for a wide variety of symbols in the interior of a text file. But without font files containing the order of 64K symbols, the current fragmented font-file situation will continue to limit what can easily be output to a screen or a printer. It is difficult for me to share your optimism. > C. Unicode, not Latin1, is the future. Maybe, but not in my lifetime. -- Tom _______________________________________________ lilypond-user mailing list lilypond-user@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-user
