Re: ERB decisions on A.17, B.9, and other questions

At 07:56 PM 10/20/96 -0700, Tim Bray wrote:
>His second concern is vastly overblown.  Given the use of the 10646
>repertoire, the population of characters that are needed but undefined
>falls dramatically - those that do appear are either
>
> a) so exotic that a bit of extra work in encoding them seems a minor
>    concern, or
> b) really graphics in disguise, like for example a Xerox trademark.

Hmmm, how can I sum up my feelings for this comment in a nice polite
manner.... Ahhh, BULL!

As Anders has pointed out, there is rather poor support in Unicode for
Math. I don't yet have all of the details as I haven't gotten my Unicode
books yet, but from what I have seen so far, it isn't adequate for the
relatively simple yet extensive math that we have in our docs. The one
obvious one that jumped out at me was that there didn't seem to be any
way to differentiate script, open face, and Fraktur letters.

By the way, I concur wholeheartedly with the opinions expressed by
David and Lee. There are plenty of times when I could predict that
the receiving system will not be able to render the character that I
want them to see. Given that, a reasonable description of the character
*could* suffice. Some meaningless number, would be just that--
meaningless.

bob


Robert Streich				streich@slb.com
Schlumberger				voice: 1 512 331 3318
Austin Research				fax:   1 512 331 3760

Received on Wednesday, 23 October 1996 03:35:21 UTC