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Received: by minnie.vk1xwt.ampr.org with NNTP id AA5364 ; Wed, 23 Dec 92 15:17:06 EST Xref: sserve comp.unix.bsd:9257 comp.os.linux:20107 Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd,comp.os.linux Path: sserve!manuel.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!sgiblab!darwin.sura.net!paladin.american.edu!news.univie.ac.at!hp4at!mcsun!sun4nl!freya.let.rug.nl!thor!s0356514 From: s0356514@let.rug.nl (H.H. Bergman) Subject: Re: UNICODE (was Dumb Americans (was INTERNATIONALIZATION:...) Message-ID: <1992Dec21.194942.16107@let.rug.nl> Sender: news@let.rug.nl (news manager) Nntp-Posting-Host: thor.let.rug.nl Organization: Faculteit der Letteren, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, NL X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.1 PL6] References: <1992Dec18.165905.8414@unislc.uucp> Date: Mon, 21 Dec 1992 19:49:42 GMT Lines: 47 Ed Carp (erc@unislc.uucp) wrote: : Richard L. Goerwitz (goer@kimbark.uchicago.edu) wrote: : : : One of the big criticism leveled at US Engineers is that they are either : : too dumb or lazy to build into their software support for non-Western : : scripts. : : I'd be more than happy to build internationalization into my code, if I knew how : to do it... <sigh> Plan 9 supports Unicode/UTF. They have postscript manuals available somewhere too. Unicode uses 16 bit characters with the usual 7-bit ASCII set included in the beginning. UTF is a special encoding that is compatible with normal 7-bit ASCII files, as long as you use only the regular ASCII chars. For higher characters it uses a multibyte sequence. The problem with Unicode is of course, that to support it fully, you'll need to adapt all existing programs. [And displaying non-ascii characters on a simple terminal is out of the question.] There are two books published by the Unicode Consortium that describe the unicode standard. I've only seen the second part, but from reading that, the first part seems to be pretty essential. They cost about $40 here each, I think, so I haven't bought them yet. It would be possible to map a subset of the Unicode characters to ASCII or Latin-1 in order to display tex on simple non-graphic terminals. Xwindows seems to support 16-bit characters too, but I have no info about that at all. *Lots* [I dare say, nearly every C program in existence] of programs assume sizeof(char)=1 byte. With Unicode this is no longer true, causing lots of problems for characters > 127. If enough people want this, I may consider writing a support library for Unicode/UTF to provide basic manipulations. [But I'll first have to do some more hacking on my QIC-02 driver...] Somebody want to donate Unicode fonts to GNU? [They also need other free fonts btw.] Once the GNU text/file/bin utils support Unicode/UFT, others will probably follow, but it would still require *lots* of effort. Linus, how would you feel about having Unicode support in the kernel? Having Unicode filenames would be really cool. ;-) : -- : Ed Carp erc@apple.com, erc@saturn.upl.com 801/538-0177 --Hennus Bergman