Re: Tech: Unicode (was...)

--- "Mark P. Line" <mark@...> wrote:
> Philippe Caquant said:
> > I can't see the point.
>
> It was a joke.
What a relief.

> Short, non-joking answer: If I absolutely need to
> show something to
> members of this list that is in Cyrillic, Greek,
> Armenian, Georgian or
> anything else that many people's mail clients won't
> render properly, I'll
> find a way to put it on a web page and post the
> link.
>
> It's much more likely, though, that I'll just use
> some sort of Latin
> transliteration and be done with it.
You may put in on a web page if you have a Web site,
but I haven't. I think I'm not the only one in this
situation.

The Latin tranlisteration is of course not
satisfactory, because everybody will use his own
transliteration, just as I do when I'm trying to
transliterate Russian for ex. Why should I write "Ja
ne znaju" (I don't know) when I could write "Ya nie
znayou", which would be much more understandable to
French people ? And how could somebody know that "ju"
(or "you"), and "ja" (or "ya") are single letters in
Cyrillic if he didn't study Cyrillic first ? How
should I differentiate the "e" in "eto" (this) and the
e in "ne" (no), using only US standard characters ?
(I'm sure everybody has his own solution, which is
just the problem). How should I write French "e
acute", "e grave", "e trema", "e circumflex" ?

The method you describe below would be considerably
simplified if you used coding and decoding macros
(which I was trying to explain). So you wouldn't have
to find the hex Unicodes, the macro would do it for
you ! (that's what macros are intended for, usually:
saving time and errors)

If you have the right macro, you could have in one
window the e-mail message, in another window a Word
document including the macro, so you would just do
copy/pastes and button-clickings (for ex) to translate
everything properly, without having to think about
anything. You don't have to know whether the
characters are Cyrillic, Arabic, Hebraic or whatever,
the macro will show you the result anyway ! And the
macro could of course be shared among all users
(again, copy + paste, once for all). You wouldn't have
to rewrite it, except in case you don't use Word, of
course.

> Either of these approaches will be orders of
> magnitude simpler than
>
> 1. me finding the hex unicodes for my string of
> special characters;
>
> 2. me putting the string of codes into an email
> without too many errors;
>
> 3. every subscriber who's interested preparing some
> sort of macro
> mechanism that will translate my codes into the
> right glyphs (not knowing,
> of course, if I'm going to spring Cyrillic, Tamil or
> Hangul on them this
> week);
>
> 4. every subscriber who's interested pasting my
> string of codes into their
> translation device and observing the result.
>
>
>
> No. (You're confusing Unicode with its evil twin,
> Multicode.)
> Yes. (I often fail to incorporate Hangul codes in
> what I write.)
> Yes. (Perfectly standard.)
> No. (Not not perfectly standard.)
> What about it?
>
> http://www.unicode.org/
>
Thanks for the address, very interesting, and awfully
complex as it seems. But after just a 3 minutes-look,
I already noticed that there are many successive
versions of Unicode (which is quite understandable),
including complements but also changes, so clearly
there is not one Unicode but many different versions
of Unicode, even if the most usual codes are probably
not affected from one version to the next one. So
Unicode is Unicode only insofar you and me share the
same version.



=====
Philippe Caquant

"High thoughts must have high language." (Aristophanes, Frogs)


	
		
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