LL-L "Resources" 2002.02.03 (05) [E]

[Lowlands-L]

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From: Sandy Fleming [sandy at scotstext.org]
Subject: "Resources"

> From: R. F. Hahn <sassisch at yahoo.com>
> Subject: Resources
>
> Wunnerfae, Andy!
>
> A probably naive question:
>
> I can't see the parenthesized Unicode characters, even when I switch the
> encoding mode in the view menu to Unicode (UTF 8).

Yes, good work, Andy!

I can see them all _except_ the length mark, which just shows
as the empty rectangle. Since it's a spacing modifier character,
maybe you need to treat it differently?

> Anyway, can you (or someone else) explain a bit more about Unicode and
> its uses?

The unicode homepage is at http://www.unicode.org/ but here's
a summary of the concept.

Using unicode with HTML is simple, provided the user has a
recent browser and has selected the appropriate settings,
and has a unicode font installed on his machine. It's really
just like ASCII but each character is represented by a larger
number, which makes far more codes available to represent
characters. A unicode font such as Lucida Sans Unicode is
divided into blocks of related characters as follows:

ASCII
The ISO Latin Blocks (traditional extensions to ASCII)
IPA Extensions - a small block of IPA characters that
                 aren't found in any other blocks (but
                 note that when using unicode for IPA
                 you generally have to forage through
                 all the other blocks for the exact
                 character you want)
Spacing Modifier Letters - a block for adding independent
                           diacritics to other characters
Greek and Coptic, and Greek Extended
Cyrillic
Armenian
Hebrew
Arabic
Devanagari
Thai
Tibetan
...and others...!
...plus many other symbols for punctuation, spacing,
arrows, mathematics, line drawing &c.

Also, recently some really unusual blocks such as Tolkein
and Shavian have been added, but Klingon was rejected. All
I can say to that is that Klingon is a lot more used than
Shavian ever will be - unless its inclusion in unicode makes
Shavian suddenly popular!

Anyway, you get the idea - it's basically a single, simple
character set, but on a gigantic scale.

To use it in HTML, you just have to type the code as shown on
Andy's site - just everything from the ampersand to the colon,
inclusive.

Alternatively you can find a code by looking it up - I use
O'Reilly's "XML in a Nutshell" (and ask Andy when I can't
get it to work - but that's getting rarer now!), or you
could use the unicode site, but if I remember when I last
tried to use it, it's not very convenient, although you
could just print off the blocks you're interested in. Or
maybe they've improved it since I last looked.

You might also find that your character map utility allows
you to select unicode characters when you've selected a
unicode font.

As I said, you need to have a unicode font installed for
unicode characters to appear properly on your machine.
Also, any applications you use have to support unicode
for it to work with them - for example, your wordprocessor,
spreadsheet, text editor &c would have to be sufficiently
up to date.

Sandy
http://scotstext.org
A dinna dout him, for he says that he
On nae accoont wad ever tell a lee.
                          - C.W.Wade,
                    'The Adventures o McNab'

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