Re: Q: Unicode available/planned for (La)TeX(3)?

[Berthold Horn <bkph@ai.mit.edu>]

At 19:22 1999-02-26 +0000, Chris Rowley wrote:

>Do I detect some recidivism here!?

>I thought you had reassured me that all these wonderful OSs
support
>platform-independent portable font resources nowadays?

>Thus a "unicode-encoded font" may be "in Windows"
now but I hope that
>we do not have to use them, whatever they may be and however easy
this
>may be.

>To whom getting on with what are a fixed encoding and OS-embedded
font
>resources a boon?

>In fact, I have yet to see a font encoding that is anything other
than "using
>16-bit numbers" but maybe "unicode" ones exist
somewhere.

>And I have not even started on phrases like "almost
infinite" yet:-).

Not sure I follow :-)  The idea is that presently we have a plethora
of
code pages (*), encoding vectors etc.  primarily because with only
256 character codes we can't deal with anything but some small 
subset of characters at a time.

According to Unicode Consortium, characters are not glyphs and 
glyphs are not characters, and Unicode 16 bit numbers are about 
characters. So they should be used only on the "input" side,
and 
not for naming glyphs.

But aside from Unicode being used for character coding, it is also 
de facto being used for glyph encoding.  Which is counter to
the
religion of the Unicode consortium, but a great thing when nothing
better is available.  No longer any need to mess with code
pages
and encoding vectors.  So 0x015E is Scedilla in all of the
fonts
that we make that have Scedilla, and 0x0162 is Tcommaaccent.
No need to explain anything, no need to jump through hoops.

Windows NT supports this nicely, as may the next Mac OS.
Even ATM in Windows NT does the right thing.

Regards, Berthold.

(*) "So would you say I have a plethora of
piñatas?"

Berthold K.P. Horn      Cambridge, Massachusetts (M)