Hi again,

>  Hi,
>
>> But seriously, we can have our cake and eat it too (Yay!).  No one is
>> probably reading this thread anymore, but did anything come of the mentions
>> earlier on the list about Unicode?  Now that TrueType fonts are being
>> integrated into Squeak perhaps those free non-Roman fonts on the internet
>> could be used to make Squeak truly international.  And Unicode has both the
>> left arrow (U+2190) and the up arrow (U+2191).  The question of which key
>> to press to get these characters is secondary (I vote for CTRL-ALT-DELETE
>> for _ )
>
>  This could be another source of the frame, but I want to
>say that Unicode is almost useless for 'internationalization'
>and 'multilingualization'.  It is just a compromized way to
>'localization' easier.

I'm not sure of the meaning of these terms - can you expand a little?

My understanding is that localisation is at its simplest where I can choose
a default and get all of my menus in French; 'internationisation' and
'multilingualisation' are much more...

I understand that moving to an internal Unicode representation by itself
doesn't solve the problem of a English based method taking a list of terms,
some in Cantonese and some in Cyrillic and trying to display them in
'alphabetical order' - much more would be needed to make Squeak be
"language neutral" then to merely change to a multibyte encoding format for
characters.

>  As for m18n, the way Mule and Emacs 20 use provides a good
>suggestion.

As I understand it, Mule in Emacs can read and write various text files
encoded in, eg, Latin-1 or Chinese-BIG5, but then translates those files to
an internal multibyte format.  Is there any reason why that internal format
shouldn't be Unicode? Is there a better alternative?

>
>                                             OHSHIMA Yoshiki
>                Dept. of Mathematical and Computing Sciences
>                               Tokyo Institute of Technology

Russell

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Russell Allen

russell.allen at firebirdmedia.com

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