Date: Wed, 5 Apr 2000 15:00:52 -0400 From: Garance A Drosihn <drosih@rpi.edu> To: Alex Belits <abelits@phobos.illtel.denver.co.us>, Anatoly Vorobey <mellon@pobox.com> Cc: hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Unicode on FreeBSD Message-ID: <v04210109b51139d8041a@[128.113.24.47]> In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.20.0004050950210.11214-100000@phobos.illtel.denver.co.us> References: <Pine.LNX.4.20.0004050950210.11214-100000@phobos.illtel.denver.co.us>
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At 10:10 AM -0700 4/5/00, Alex Belits wrote: >On Wed, 5 Apr 2000, Anatoly Vorobey wrote: > > > > that the way that TeX handles such a text is even more inconvenient, > > > however even now it's most likely that TeX would be used for this kind of > > > typesetting. > > > > But we're *not* talking about typesetting -- rather about multilingual > > text handling. TeX, indeed, does typesetting and thus solves the wrong > > problem. > > It solves exactly the same problem -- displaying information. Unicode >does NOTHING to support any other functionality that is required for true >multilingual text processing. You can't even do a hyphenation of unicode >text -- you will have to guess, which language rules should apply. I think what you need to do is present the alternative to unicode that you want people to use. Not just complaints about unicode, although I do understand some of the points you're raising, but an actual implementation or something considerably more concrete than just dissing unicode or some of the more fanatical backers of unicode. > > In "real life" someone who needs to handle text with Russian > > and French in it -- type it, send it, read it, study it, etc. -- not > > *typeset* it -- won't use TeX for it, but will rather walk over to the > > Windows machine and fire up Word. This is the solution that's used in > > "real life" right now > > This only happens because those people use Word, and Word happens to use >Unicode. Well, Word uses a lot of things that I consider to be stupid and >poorly designed -- its popularity is based definitely not on technical >merit > > > -- and incidentally, one of the reasons it's > > become so annoyingly common to email Word files as some kind of > > universal text standard. > > Word is not a standard, it's a format forced on a lot of people by some >pretty shady practice of certain company that in few recent days was >mentioned often enough to make it pointless to be described again. All of which is utterly irrelevant to reality. How we (the computer industry) are in the mess we are in belongs in some philosophy mailing list. The reality is that real-world users ARE IN FACT using MS-Word because that lets them do something they want to do. If we do not let them do those same things, then we can't very well complain that they stick to MS-Word while we sit in some ivory tower and bitch and moan about "how good it should be". Either we MAKE IT as good as it should be, or we at least shut up and provide people SOME way to do what they want to do. I think the recent comments have clarified things a bit, in that it sounds like you're not complaining about unicode changes per se. You just seem to want to make sure that any unicode changes also leave the door open to more extensive changes which you feel are needed before the job is really done right. That much more understandable to me. On the other hand, it still seems to me that people interested in unicode changes for FreeBSD should just go ahead and start working on them, and hope that anyone with a wider-scope will provide input to those changes. However, I do not think the unicode changes should wait until after some other super-wonderful solution is ironed out. I emphatically deny the view that supporting unicode now will dictate anything about what we do in the future, any more than the past should dictate that we never get unicode support working. I don't see any point in further debate on whether there should be unicode support, I think anyone interested in doing ANY work should be encouraged to do so, and anyone else interested in the issues can contribute their ideas on implementation issues. Note that I am not disagreeing with your views on what is necessary for a long-term solution, I just think that working on a mid-term solution is better than doing nothing at all in the area. --- Garance Alistair Drosehn = gad@eclipse.acs.rpi.edu Senior Systems Programmer or drosih@rpi.edu Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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