On Mon, Nov 14, 2011 at 1:52 PM, Naena Guru <[email protected]> wrote: > As for, "every other operation that could be performed on text is secondary" > is beautifully met with fonts too.
No. Every operation besides simple storage and display needs to know how that font maps the 8-bit codes to display characters. üÔÏ may display as Это, but spellchecking, translation, and everything else under the sun needs to know that ü is really Э to process the data. > I do not understand what you meant by "jury-rigged to accommodate visual > display order". Did you mean using unexpected shapes for Latin codes? No. For one, Hebrew and Arabic don't go left-to-right. If you use a font solution for them, you'll end up typing your letters in backwards and manually putting in line breaks, because rewrap will move the wrong text to the next line. A font solution is basically worthless for those languages. > 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. Why? OCR is hard. Once you know enough to express it as a stream of characters for a font solution, converting it to Unicode is trivial. -- Kie ekzistas vivo, ekzistas espero.
