Re: Enhanced Unicode support for "Go" tools
From: Beth (BethStone21_at_hotmail.NOSPICEDHAM.com)
Date: 05/19/04
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Date: Wed, 19 May 2004 16:07:49 +0100
The Wannabee wrote:
> Yeah. How about telling me the why its so important. Whats the
big deal.
I have; You posted this while I was still writing the post with
the attempt at an explanation...
> I havent seen a single app using unicode my whole life.
Oh, I bet you have! You just never noticed...
Windows (any NT-based kernel version) uses UNICODE
_throughout_...the "A" functions are "comptability wrappers" to
support ASCII for those who've not "upgraded" yet...
Practically all web browsers support UNICODE these days...Linux
has it built into the kernel...XFree86 and Xterm and so forth
have full support...
The point with UNICODE, though, is that you _WON'T_ notice when
it's working...it's one of those things - like good camerawork -
that is _GOOD_ when you, in fact, don't notice it's even
there...
But "the proof of the pudding is in the eating"...the big deal
is that - presuming, as is likely running Windows or Linux, that
your OS / browser software supports it - you can click on the
following links:
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/examples/UTF-8-demo.txt
(general UTF-8 support test page)
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/examples/lyrics-ipa.txt
(Beastie Boys song lyrics encoded using the IPA alphabet...the
IPA alphabet, by the way, is a _sound_ based alphabet designed
for writing _pronounciations_...if you know how to pronounce the
IPA alphabet then even if you can't speak English, then you
should be able to pronounce the words to this Beastie Boys song
correctly...as the IPA ("international phonetic alphabet") is an
alphabet of _sounds_, designed so that you can write down the
pronounciation of any word from any language using the IPA
symbols...used by linguists all the time and, if you've got a
good dictionary, then they often write the IPA version of a word
in brackets after the word's entry so that you can get the
pronounciation of the word along with its spelling and
definition ;)...
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/examples/rune-poem.txt
(this is a fun one...it's an old Anglo-Saxon poem written in the
old Runic alphabet ;)
And, as Rene was oversimplifying with "it's for Chinese people"
or whatever, here's a page that demonstrates its wider use by
providing "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" sentence
equivalents for a whole bunch of languages ("quick brown fox"??
Explanation: this sentence has every English alphabetic
character in it...go on, have a look...it's got all the letters
in the English alphabet from "a" to "z" in one sentence...this,
by the way, is why font viewers often use "The quick brown fox
jumps over the lazy dog" as an example sentence, so that you can
see what all the different alphabetic characters look like in
that particular font ;)...
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/examples/quickbrown.txt
(note, be careful with using Thai examples...as this page notes,
His Majesty the King of Thailand often owns the
copyright...note, unlike the British royalty, where the Brits
not only don't care about a lack of respect but are the ones who
attack them more than probably anyone else - such as our
tabloids probably having more to do with Diana's death than the
French road systems - you should be careful of the sensibilities
of the Thai to their Most Esteemed Monarch...one Salman Rushdie
in the world is enough, shall we say? ;)...
[ Note, as you may guess from the URLs, this whole folder is
full of different kinds of examples...they are meant as "test
pages" for UNICODE support and to see that it's all working as
it should (which Mozilla ought to have a look at because some of
the characters were not "spacing" properly, as they should be
according to my book and the "test page" is clearly expecting
them to be ;)...so, clip off the filename and look through the
directory itself for other examples...just picked a few
"interesting" ones to link to directly... ]
And, once you've looked at all these pages, then pay particular
attention to the _file extension_: ".txt"...these are UNICODE
text files, not ASCII text files (Hopefully, if your software is
working correctly, it will automatically work this out and you
can read them properly ;)...and in the UNICODE character set,
all the "funny characters" you see are all part of the character
set and you can happily put them all next to each other in the
same ".txt" file, no problemo...
It's not only "for Chinese people" as this small example
demonstrates...Russians and some Eastern Europeans use the
Cyrillic alphabet...Israelis use the Hebraic alphabet...Arabic
is used in many places in the Middle East (including Iraq, so
let's Hope Bush's word processor supports UNICODE...oh dear,
what am I thinking? Duh, of course, Bush would expect the
"towel-heads" to learn English before having the common decency
to at least speak to those he oppresses and abuses in their own
language or anything "civilised" like that ;)...Japan uses its
own alphabet...Thailand has a Thai alphabet...there's also
support in UNICODE for scripts used in India and Africa...
And before anyone gets to xenophobic or "insular" about things,
we have the Cherokee script and Canadian aborginal syllabics
too...plus support for mathematical notation...a whole bunch of
rather groovy "dingbats"...geometric shapes...and so
forth...none of which involve anyone jumping off North America
at all, for example...
> Besides what the
> hell does a chineese keyboard look like anyway. That would be
intressting
> to know. A five hundred level deep CAPS LOCK ???
This is actually surprisingly difficult to find out...I _have_
tried doing web searches because I was wondering about it from
an OS development perspective (you know, what stuff you'd need
to put into a keyboard driver to "make room" that all keyboards
could eventually be supported ;)...I was surprised by how
difficult it was to find any simple, you know, _pictures_ of
what all the different keyboards look like to appreciate what's
on them all...
Anyway, I suppose like the idea of an "Indian" keyboard, one
should really be talking about "Mandarin Chinese"
keyboards...big place, lots of people...there isn't only one
language...but Mandarin is the main one, as far I know (but I'm
no expert in Chinese matters, I instantly disclaim ;)...
Although, for sure, no "CAPS LOCK"...not all languages have
UPPERCASE and lowercase, you know ;)...
Just tried looking again and all I can find is stuff about
Dvorak! Though, I have considered giving Dvorak a try out...oh
yes, and if it's true that Dvorak allows you to type faster then
are you lot in trouble!! But that's just a different layout for
an English / Latin keyboard, not an actually different
keyboard...
If anyone knows where you can find a website that simply lists
out a little diagram of all the various keyboard layouts across
the world (you'd reckon _SOMEONE_ would have made such a
website, woudln't you? ;) then post up the URL for me to see it
(might also be useful to post up to the OS development groups
too, as this is a subject that OSes need to think
about...although, without the "scan codes" to go with it too, it
might not be too useful other than just to _see_ what all the
different keyboards look like ;)...
Beth :)
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