[Lexicog] UNICODE

[billposer at ALUM.MIT.EDU]

I suggest that the best way to address the question of whether
something like Unicode is harmful is to ask what, if anything, that
you can do now, you won't be able to do if Unicode becomes widely
used. As far as I can see, the answer is: nothing. Unicode simply
adds a possibility, without taking away anything that you are doing
now. If this is the case, it isn't harmful. 

On another point, there are two issues associated with changes
in encodings. One is changing the encoding of existing materials,
which as other people have said is generally not hard to do.
The other, is having to abandon existing fonts. You don't necessarily
have to give up your existing fonts in order to switch to Unicode.
If you have fonts that you like, so long as the font technology,
is reasonably modern, you can simply re-encode them.

There isn't really any such thing as a "Unicode font"; there are
only "Unicode-encoded" fonts, that is, fonts in which the glyphs
are paired with codepoints in conformity to the Unicode standard.
In some primitive font formats, the encoding is implicit in the
order of the glyph descriptions, so unless you can rearrange the
font you can't change its encoding, and there is no way at all to get
out of the range 0-255. In formats like Truetype, the codepoint is
associated with each glyph description, so you can use a font editor
to change the encoding without otherwise modifying the font.
I've done this for a couple of fonts. In both cases it took less
than an hour, though of course the time needed will depend on the
number of characters in the font.

Bill

--
Bill Poser, Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania
http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~wjposer/ billposer at alum.mit.edu


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