Wish list.

1.  Display Latin Extended A letters correctly.
2.  Support English (as well as American).
3.  Save as ASCII.

I'm using Amaya in New Zealand.  We have two official languages here,
English and Māori.  Māori is written in the Latin alphabet,
using the same punctuation marks as English, BUT vowel length is
an important part of spelling.

Current practice is to misuse ISO Latin 1, and use vowels with umlauts
instead of vowels with macrons.  This looks very wrong, so current
practice is also to install bodged fonts so that the vowels with umlauts
are displayed as vowels with macrons.  Trouble with that is that the
texts look really stupid everywhere else on the planet.

HTML 4 and XML are based on ISO 10646.

Would it be so very much to ask that Amaya should support the
Latin Extended A area of ISO 10646 (characters u+0100 to u+017f)?
There is a Unicode font available for the X Window System, and I
reckon fixed width letters with the right accent would be better
than proportionally spaced letters with the wrong accent.

It would also be extremely nice to have an English version of Amaya.
Currently there is an American version, but it's really rather
irritating.  I'd be happy to provide English versions of the
relevant files if someone will tell me which ones I can safely edit
and how to persuade Amaya to use them.

It's rather more of a nuisance coping with having an American
dictionary instead of an English one.  I might have a go at that,
but I don't know what the format is.

Finally, I like to process HTML pages with a variety of tools,
and in particular, I provide them on Macintoshes.  For that reason,
it is important that my HTML editor *NOT* convert æ and other
character entities to ISO Latin 1 bytes in the output.  It would be
really useful if there were an option in the Save/Save As diaglogue
to select between ASCII and Latin-1 (and maybe some day UTF-8?)
output, ideally with a Preference to configure the default.

Here I am not asking that Amaya _remember_ whether character entities
were used or not, only that when it saves a file, it be able to
_generate_ a character entity whenever there's something outside the
ASCII range.

Received on Friday, 19 May 2000 03:28:18 UTC