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

At 09:07 AM 10/21/96 CDT, Michael Sperberg-McQueen wrote:
>Here's a confession that if this behavior is widely implemented, I
>haven't seen it in the software I use most frequently.  Perhaps I
>just don't read the manuals carefully enough, but the only program
>that comes to mind as describing any behavior like this is Panorama,
>and its functionality (rendering correctly all the characters in the
>ISO entity sets for which the local system has font resources) can
>be done with character references to ISO 10646, since all the
>characters in the ISO entity sets are in 10646 (some glyphs
>representing ligatures are missing).

Since I don't know what tools you use, Michael, I can't contradict you,
but I can say that the replacement text is used with all the tools that
I use daily, including the ones that I wrote. For a transform to Interleaf,
the replacement text is the necessary Interleaf markup for that
character; for a transform to HTML, it is an IMG tag with the URL to a
library of GIF images that I created from TeX.

>As to the other proposition, that it is widely understood, I can
>only say that if it is widely understood, then surely someone can be
>found to describe the behavior on this list explicitly enough that
>the rest of us can also understand it.  I for one do not understand
>the behavior, and would really like a description, preferably with
>reference to some documentation.

The behavior is really up to the application: it is system data, thus
essentially the same as a system identifier. It is up to the system to
determine what to do with it.

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 03:35:30 UTC