It became apparent that we need a unique way of identifying characters when
dealing with them in different operating systems with different
configurations.
The only option coming up was Unicode. It would be used in two areas:
1. Technical spec of fonts
Especially the handling of character sets requires a neutral and consistent
way to identify characters.
2. Dialogs
Any Universal Printer Driver will have a dialog. Some other strings like
font names will even be passed through to applications.
It would be a huge problem to have different conditions for storing these
strings based on different operating system character sets.
While there seemed to be a wide consensus about the use of Unicode to
accomplish that every company shall have the chance to discuss this
internally and check current policies.
It needs a little more investigation to find out about the appropriate
encoding form. It will most probably be either UTF-8 or UTF-16. When
searching in the Internet it looks as if UTF-8 is the current leader in
industry standards. Saving the Unicode in the theoretic default value of
four bytes is not an option.
We'll wait til end of March 2000 for statements. After that there will be a
time to vote on that.
While chatting around I found a number of XML editors either available or
under development, which support at least UTF-8. So this should not be a
problem at all.
Norbert
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed Feb 16 2000 - 10:24:47 EST