Unicode shooting from the hip

[Richmond]

On 04/01/14 23:32, Mark Wieder wrote:
> Richmond-
>
> Saturday, January 4, 2014, 1:23:46 PM, you wrote:
>
>> http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html
>> "Did you ever get an email from your friends in Bulgaria with the
>> subject line "???? ?????? ??? ????"?"
>> Oh, Ha, Ha, Ha; it just had to be Bulgaria, didn't it? (that's a tag
>> question grammar fans).
>> Good article though.
> Um. Hilarity aside, that's an article from ten years ago.
> That said, I always find anything Joel writes worth reading.
>

10 years is a long time in some places: BUT not in the area of academic 
institutions (read "Universities"; I use the quotes knowing
what I mean); The 100 different types of written language encoding that 
Spolsky mentioned are alive, well and causing major headaches
in the "places of higher learning" all across our sweet, green earth (I 
wish it were; not the polluted furball we have let it become
  -  err, sorry, socio-political rave there).

Trying to explain to people who think that somebody is being stupid 
because they don't have Windows XP and use the
encoding "we've always used" for their language which they speak in 
their wee corner of the world (and if you think I am
speaking ONLY about Bulgarian, you are dead wrong) is like trying to 
climb Mount Everest in a pair of ballet shoes and holding
  a pair of lilies in one's hands; well-nigh impossible.

Now, a while ago (about 2 months) I had to "bring back from the dead" an 
extensive piece of academic work my wife wrote
about 15 years ago, using Clarisworks 5, on Mac OS 8.6, on a PPC Mac, 
using non-standard bitmapped fonts, in such a way
that it is both machine-readable and editable in Open Office on Linux.

This stuff contained documents with English, Bulgarian, Old Church 
Slavonic, Anglo-Saxon and Gothic in them: mainly using Bitmapped fonts
I made for my wife (using the 101th encoding - the "Richmond helps his 
wife encoding") that, however good my intentions were 14 years ago
have proven a right pox subsequently.  Lots and lots of "really sexy 
fun" using 100s of search and replace routines.

That was quite a journey, and taught me the value
of a certain level of standardisation I had not appreciated until I had 
to learn about it at the sharp end.

Just to add to the fun the documents were backed up on IOmega ZIP disks 
. . . hey, what a ride, the chicks were loaded . . . but
I digress.

Now, having 'succeeded' in programming terms in wrestling the 
Sanskrit-Devanagari multi-headed serpent to the tatami mat
('Kaliya Naga' to all you Sanskrit fans out there), but 'failed' 
commercially, I am going bazonkers, producing a range of
programs for academics and so on to type dead languages according to the 
Unicode standard.

-------------------

Anyway, I am a complete convert to all things Unicode, and, seeing how 
easy things actually are once one abandons all those crazy, highly 
individualistic encodings, am dead keen on evangelising people who are 
still stuck with one of the pre-Unicode encoding "standards".

Richmond.

100 grammes of Canadian whisky with a lot of tap water followed by a 
half-litre of strong, black coffee with 24 cardamon pods floating in it.