[conspire] I renounce the devil Unicode and all of its works

[Edward Cherlin]

Yes, Rick, I'm top posting. I think myself justified in doing so,
since this is a comment on the entire discussion, not any particular
statement.

Apparently I was not talking about anything that Rick Moen ever did,
so it is not clear to me why he is bothering me about it. But we are
friends, so never mind.

There is nobody forcing Rick to use Unicode. I was talking about its
use to nutjobs like me who write documents in mixed Chinese
(Traditional _and_ Simplified), Japanese, Korean, English, and various
European languages, such as a glossary for the game of go;

HG=위기

HG=바둑

HJ=圍碁

RK=wigi

RK=baduk

HZ=圍棋

CS=围棋

CH=wei2 qi2

HR=いご

NH=囲碁

JP=igo

GB=the game of go

NL=het spel go

IT=il gioco del go

GE=formeller Name für GO

FR=Le jeu de go

SV=spelet god

(see also my sig); for One Laptop Per Child, which creates Free
Software in 100 languages in 30 character sets;

http://translate.sugarlabs.org/

For SIL.org, which works in 2,000+ languages out of more than 6,000
for which there is documentation, in even more character sets;

and for those who do engage in prepress, especially in math, APL, and
multiple languages. When I started as Managing Editor at APL News, I
had to send the publisher daisywheel printouts of every APL expression
to paste in to the typeset PDFs.

Nobody who is happy with a legacy character set should bother about
Unicode or Unicoders. Leave us alone, and we'll leave you alone. (The
worst are the Japanese Windows programmers who want us to substitute ¥
for \ because that's how it is in one of the Japanese character sets,
and who complain that Unicode is broken because they can't figure out
their own code.)

On Fri, May 20, 2011 at 03:51, Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com> wrote:
> Quoting Edward Cherlin (echerlin at gmail.com):
>
>> I have never seen such an abomination as
>
> That's not my page.  I just grabbed it from a friend's Web site (the
> English professor who was, many years ago, my assistant editor for the
> San Francisco PC User Group newsletter, from which she excerpted that
> humour item, which I wrote), without looking at the markup at all.

Did you never look at it in a browser? I don't see how that can
possibly render as apparently intended in any software.

> But I'll eventually get around to fixing the excruciatingly bad markup
> in that, now that you've pointed that out.

Thanks. There are similar problems on other pages. Unfortunately, I
did not make note of which pages I saw them on, and I have made no
attempt to search the site for other pages with such problems. I leave
it up to Rick to decide how much effort this problem merits.

>> To correctly write English requires something on the order of 500
>> characters, not including math symbols.
>
> I really cannot bring myself to care whether I can put the maximally
> effete diacritical over the second o in 'coöperation'.

IFYP

>  (See point about
> prepress, below.  Sorry, I'm not doing prepress at the moment, and
> pretending I am fools nobody.)

Neither am I. This is Unicode plain text.

§©®Å✓…– —, among others.

>> It is quite proper to loathe certain sections of Unicode...
>
> I don't loathe it as a general proposition, only as a ridiculously
> excessive solution for the problem of western European (and especially
> English) charsets.

That is not its purpose. It is a solution for more than 100 writing
systems, and a vast multitude of non-linguistic symbols used as
characters in practice. But it works for Western European languages,
including Yiddish and Ladino, and other European languages using
non-Latin alphabets, including Greek and a number of Slavic languages.
Or do you subscribe to the "No real European" fallacy in the EU age?
^_^

> Arguably, the English language would be less of a train wreck if we
> _did_ use the sort of diacritical overload characteristic of, say,
> Vietnamese or Finnish,

The problem arises from Phoenician, which had no need of vowel
letters. The Greeks and Romans repurposed a few of the letters they
inherited, but it didn't occur to them that they could invent more.
Apparently mathematicians started the trend, and linguists later on.
The American Mathematical
Society has documented well over a thousand symbols used in its
journals and submitted for inclusion in Unicode.

Caleb Gattegno used color and letter combinations for the individual
sounds in his language teaching. The charts are available at
educationalsolutions.com.

> but that boat has sailed,

Yes, Shavian and Deseret failed, but they are in Unicode. Braille is
still doing fairly well though heavily overloaded for different
alphabets and a vast number of abbreviations in each language, plus
music.

> and we simply live with
> the possibility of silly jokes about chemists refusing to be unionised.
> ;->

I helped the PBS program Children of the Code with a number of such
examples, including

He wound the bandage around the wound.

One of the best is

Though he slough off the rough cough and hiccough ploughing through the slough.

>> U+0022, UTF-8 0x22
>>
>> What's the problem?
>
> UTF-8 is.  And that's a bad solution in search of an imaginary problem,
> IMO, as I actually prefer vertical double-quotation marks, and really
> don't like the curly things except when doing prepress DTP preparation.
>
> (Last time I did prepress, it was in Ventura Publisher for GEM, and we
> used Ventura's tags applied in an ASCII editor to copy submitted in
> plaintext.)

You poor fellow. I got to Pagemaker and Framemaker. Now I can use
Quanta Plus, booki, and

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--
Edward Mokurai (默雷/धर्ममेघशब्दगर्ज/دھرممیگھشبدگر ج) Cherlin
Silent Thunder is my name, and Children are my nation.
The Cosmos is my dwelling place, the Truth my destination.



-- 
Edward Mokurai (默雷/धर्ममेघशब्दगर्ज/دھرممیگھشبدگر ج) Cherlin
Silent Thunder is my name, and Children are my nation.
The Cosmos is my dwelling place, the Truth my destination.
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Replacing_Textbooks