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SubjectRe: Unicode support on VGA console.
Alex Belits wrote:

> On Wed, 6 Oct 1999, Steve Underwood wrote:
>
> > language (about the same number can speak English and Mandarin, but less
> > Mandarin speakers can read), but still much of the human race would like to
> > manage low end products in a language other than English.
> >
> > Promote multi-lingual everyone!
> >
>
> Most people (more precisely, almost everyone) use their local
> standards, not Unicode. Unicode is promoted by English-centric or
> Europe-centric (iso8859-1) people, and is hated by almost everyone else.

I think this is almost, but not quite, spot on. Until recently I was one of
those haters (I am a native English reader, but use Chinese a lot). Only an
ASCII-centric user would think UTF8 is anything but a total bodge. Its about as
clean and elegant as the Windows 98 code base. It makes all our Asian language
text files 50% larger, and until version 3 had some serious limitations. Unicode
has been almost universally ignored, as a waste of time, in Asia. It solved
nothing and created new problems. Behind the scenes Unicode it is actually used
heavily in Asia, as most MS code works in a messy mish-mash of Unicode and local
codes (scratch beneath the surface, and you will see the idea of NT as a clean
Unicode environment is a bad joke). I recently had a change of heart on Unicode,
for a couple of reasons.

However much people hate Unicode (with excellent reasons) the limitations in
other codes are no longer being fixed. It is Unicode which is now making
progress. For example, no proper standard for adding Cantonese Dialect
characters to any other Chinese character set exists (apart from a Hong Kong
Government spec. that is not widely used). There is now an extensive set of
Cantonese characters in Unicode 3. The nastiest of the merged character issues
seem to have been cleaned up in Unicode 3. The character set of Unicode 3
actually seems superior to most others, so the baseline of it being usable has
been reached for me. I think its also pretty usable for most other languages
these days. I think its inevitable that UTF8 is going to be the form in which
most Unicode text exists, and non-English users are going to have to face the
text bloat it causes.

The other main issue is of common ground. I think those of us who want to see
effective internationisation/multinationalisation want to see it happen at
source. I mean we want developers to develop in i18n capability, and have all
the translations, etc. in the main source tree. That can only realistically
happen with a common character code. Developers cannot understand every
language, but they need to be able to display every language, and check their
software behaves in a sensible way (90% of this requires very little knowledge
of the language being displayed). Right now, this hardly ever happens. Large
numbers of people are beavering away converting endless programs to Russian,
Chinese, Japanese, etc. At the next software release the work will start all
over again. The GNU tools provide a framework for dealing with the bare text
translations, but little else that is language dependent. The only realistic way
to assist authors to handle the bulk of i18n issues themselves is to use a
common character code. The authors can then accept submissions for translation,
character input and character display issues, etc. and merge them with the main
source tree.

So, I have come to see Unicode as the only realistic way to reduce the
reinvention of the wheel in i18n/l10n/m17n issues, and promote the production of
properly internationalised open source code. Any opinions to the contrary are
welcome.

Steve



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