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From: jr@inset.UUCP (Jim R Oldroyd)
Newsgroups: net.internat
Subject: What do we REALLY want?
Message-ID: <723@inset.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 8-Oct-85 14:36:23 EDT
Article-I.D.: inset.723
Posted: Tue Oct  8 14:36:23 1985
Date-Received: Fri, 11-Oct-85 08:34:41 EDT
Reply-To: jr@inset.UUCP (Jim R Oldroyd)
Organization: The Instruction Set Ltd., London, UK.
Lines: 46
Xpath: stc stc-a


One of the things I preceive from discussions on international
UNIX, is that many people are merely thinking in terms of
enhancing existing software to solve one particular aspect
of a much larger multi-faceted problem.

I first asked the question: "What do we REALLY want?".  Ignore
issues of implementation for a moment - consider the situation
we find ourselves faced with.

It would be useful for me if I could, not only edit a file
containing English text, but also intersperse at will text in
a different language.  Simple.  OK, but what if I suggest that
the other language is Arabic?  And then, I want to go on and
combine this with characters in different fonts and point sizes.

I also have a printer with a programable character set.  I have
taken the trouble to ``design'' a character containing the
company logo, another with a pointed hand, bullets, pound signs
etc.  I look at them as ordinary single characters and I have
a need to manipulate files containing these characters using
my editor, grep, sort and so on.

I do not want to learn strange hieroglyphics like \(*p for the
Greek character pi, or the sequence \o'\(is_-' to get a British
Sterling symbol.

These are a few points.  To get what I want I will need
not only new utilities, but also special hardware such as a
bitmapped display terminal.

You can see that I need an extremely large and variable
character set.  It is not possible to construct that set out
of existing character sets, nor to expect a final set to
remain static.

I believe that the time is now ripe for the computer world
to take a jump from the traditional viewpoint and realize
that users' requirements in these days of networks and
typesetters are already far ahead of anything that an
enhanced character set can provide.

-- 
++ Jim R Oldroyd
++ jr@inset.UUCP
++ ..!mcvax!ukc!inset!jr