From: Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de>
To: Drew Adams <drew.adams@oracle.com>
Cc: 3501@emacsbugs.donarmstrong.com
Subject: bug#3501: 23.0.94; Use Unicode in Info (?)
Date: Tue, 9 Jun 2009 18:17:05 +0000 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <20090609181705.GD11634@muc.de> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <4A0B2BEF97F8491FA12CBE48BBCE7EC9@us.oracle.com>
'Evening, Drew!
On Tue, Jun 09, 2009 at 10:43:01AM -0700, Drew Adams wrote:
> > Please no. I absolutely do not want to "experience" fancy
> > unicode characters when reading info. It's bad enough
> > getting them in email and in usenet postings from Xah Lee. ;-)
> What'll you tell your new Unicode toaster, when your old toaster
> breaks? ;-) Better give up on iPhone and other such new-fangled gadgets
> altogether.
Exactly the same I told the old toaster: they both understand ASCII.
> > ASCII can be displayed perfectly on any screen or teletype or even
> > punched card puncher that can display English at all. Unicode, by
> > contrast, needs a fancy setup, even if lots of computers already have
> > such a setup.
> Isn't Emacs capable of somehow knowing whether the current display can
> show non-ASCII chars? If not, we'll forever remain with
> horse-and-buggy, I guess.
Emacs is capable of anything, provided you put enough effort into telling
it. Assuming you're running on a pure ASCII display, or one running an
ISO-8859 character set (as I do), how much effort must you put into
telling Emacs (and standalone Info) that you really, really don't want
random Unicode bytes cluttering up your screen?
> I'm not against coddling your sturdy old card punch, but not at the
> price of giving up the world beyond ASCII for the rest of, well, the
> world beyond ASCII (does your punch _really_ speak ASCII, or does it
> speak EBCDIC or perhaps Univac field-data chars?).
> Would you by the same token remove the possibility of Emacs files to
> use Unicode chars?
Not at all. Quite a lot of people want Unicode, but quite a lot don't.
We shouldn't force it upon them.
> Library buff-menu.el uses utf-8 encoding, for example, and displays a
> U+2014 (em dash char) if available. It tests like this:
> ;; Use U+2014 (EM DASH) to underline if possible,
> ;; else use ASCII (i.e. U+002D, HYPHEN-MINUS).
> (if (char-displayable-p ?\u2014) ?\u2014 ?-)
> Presumably something similar (but preferably more general) can be done
> to ensure that your card punch can swallow J/orgensen if it can't
> digest Jørgensen.
Who's volunteering to do this?
> > Is that bad? J/orgensen is more readable (IMHO) than JÀ«rgensen (or
> > whatever that letter's two bytes actually are).
> Jørgensen is more readable than J/orgensen, but J/orgensen is fine for
> a card punch. ;-)
Possibly. But I have just the _tiniest_ suspicion that this is the thin
end of the wedge, the crack in the dyke, the floodgates wanting to burst
open. How long before people start using Xah's fancy 3-byte quote marks,
with associated dangly bits hanging off them?
--
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2009-06-09 18:17 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 14+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2009-06-08 21:58 bug#3501: 23.0.94; Use Unicode in Info (?) Drew Adams
2009-06-09 3:11 ` Eli Zaretskii
2009-06-09 3:23 ` Drew Adams
2009-06-09 3:42 ` Eli Zaretskii
2009-06-09 4:10 ` Drew Adams
2009-06-09 17:17 ` Alan Mackenzie
2009-06-09 17:43 ` Drew Adams
2009-06-09 18:17 ` Alan Mackenzie [this message]
2009-06-09 19:56 ` Drew Adams
2009-06-09 21:10 ` Alan Mackenzie
2009-06-09 21:31 ` Lennart Borgman
2009-06-09 22:48 ` Jason Rumney
2009-06-09 17:46 ` Lennart Borgman
2009-06-25 23:12 ` Stefan Monnier
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