From: Erland Sommarskog (sommar-usefor@algonet.se)
Date: Mon Jul 31 2000 - 04:24:17 CDT
Russ Allbery <rra@stanford.edu> writes:
> The other problem, of course, is that "a reader that understands UTF-8" is
> a rather theoretical notion under the best of circumstances; most people
> aren't going to have fonts that cover the entire Unicode code space.
> Understanding the structure of UTF-8 is one thing. Having a reader that
> can map particular codes to displayable characters is another and is
> almost always going to be partial.
I normally read mail with mailx on Unix, and since my Telnet client
don't grasp UTF-8, I am of course at loss to read UTF-8 properly here.
However, I subscribe to the Unicode mailing list, and not surprisingly
messages in UTF-8 appear there. (Although not as commonly as you might
think.) If a UTF-8 message appears interesting, I forward it to my
POP address, and slurp the whole thing to my PC, running NT4 and
Outlook Express with Office 2000 installed. Now, I'm a bit of junkie,
so I made sure that I got a couple of full Unicode fonts, but I believe
you get at least one even with the default installation of Office 2000.
And in any case you surely get a font with smart quotes. So your
assessnent "is almost always going to be partial", isn't correct.
Then again, of course, there are other operating systems such as
Win98 and Unix that may not be equally good at understanding Unicode.
Today that is. It is obviously clear where we are heading. And if
Microsoft can supply full Unicode fonts, so can others.
With the risk of insulting people, let me remind you that just because
it comes from Microsoft does not mean that it's bad.
-- Erland Sommarskog, Stockholm, sommar@algonet.se