Naena Guru <naenaguru at gmail dot com> wrote: > If it came out as Unicode has its only goal as money making, that is not what > I meant to say. Nothing can be such. You sell something for the buyer's > benefit, right?
Unicode doesn't sell anything, except (I suppose) printed copies of the standard and admission to conferences. > I apologize if you feel hurt over it. I don't feel hurt. I do feel annoyed about the continued misinformation. > However, it is probably the main objective. Who works for nothing except odd > crazies like me? You'd be surprised how many people have volunteered their time and expertise to help improve Unicode. > When years back I asked why ligatures formed inside Notepad and not inside > Word, I had the clear reply that it is owing to a business decision. That doesn't mean Unicode is broken. It means that some applications have support for certain text processes that other applications don't have. Have you ever seen two graphics editors, one of which has more capabilities than the other? Does that mean the underlying graphics format is broken? > Let me try to clearly say what I want to say: > 1. Unicode came up with the idea of one codepoint for one letter of any > language. Sort of. > 2. The justification was that on one text stream you could show all the > different languages. At least that is what I understood. Not just "show." You can "perform text operations on" all the different characters. Not every Unicode-aware application is required to have fonts and rendering technology for every character or script. Otherwise nobody would have adopted it. > 3. The above 2 is not practical and does not work even now after so many years There was never a requirement that all applications can display all scripts perfectly. There has been continuous improvement over the past 20 years toward making this happen. It does not all happen at once. > 4. Why Indic code pages do not work so well for text processing is not the > fault of Unicode but that of the user groups I assume you mean 8-bit "code pages." Unicode doesn't have "code pages." > 5. However, technology arrived at those countries too late to for actual > users, not bureaucrats, to understand the mistakes Can you explain what you feel is wrong with Unicode handling of Indic text, WITHOUT repeating that not all applications can display everything perfectly? > 6. Therefore, I say that there was an undue push by Unicode to complete the > standard, by issuing ultimatums for registering ligatures etc. This is a misrepresentation, and makes no sense. > Having said all that, all is not so bad. I say transliterate to Latin and > make smartfonts. It is a proven success. How can I search a group of documents, one written in Devanagari and another in Sinhala and another in Tamil and another in Oriya, for a given string if they all use the same encoding, and the only way to tell which is which is to see them rendered in a particular font? That has been tried before. It is a proven failure. > I do not understand what you meant by "jury-rigged to accommodate visual > display order". Did you mean using unexpected shapes for Latin codes? If you > meant that, how do you justify earlier versions of Unicode standard giving > specific explanation about codepoints that they do not represent shapes and > Fraktur and Gaelic could very well use Latin as their underlying codes? Latin (Antiqua) and Fraktur and Gaelic letters are, intrinsically, the same letter. That is not true for Devanagari and Sinhala and Tamil and Oriya letters. > I think the ability to use text in the computer in the way you expect text to > behave in it is very important. For instance, if you have shape > representations mapped to code clusters, scanned text could be more > accurately digitized. Go ahead and design your own encoding, then. It may be of use for niche applications that care only about display and nothing else. -- Doug Ewell | Thornton, Colorado, USA | RFC 5645, 4645, UTN #14 www.ewellic.org | www.facebook.com/doug.ewell | @DougEwell
