4 ms·
As something of an idealist I can’t help but think Unicode was a terrible mistake. We could have used ASCII as a carrot to get the whole World speaking a common
by gaius 8y ago
As something of an idealist I can’t help but think Unicode was a terrible mistake. We could have used ASCII as a carrot to get the whole World speaking a common tongue. Think of the wars that could have been avoided, the scientific progress.
- KozmoNau7 8y agoThink of the wars over which language should win out.
- iforgotpassword 8y agoYou kinda did this, unintentionally mostly, which just resulted in every country coming up with their own incompatible encoding. Unicode tried to unify this mess again.
- Mediterraneo10 8y agoOne of your several mistakes here is to assume that Unicode is necessarily connected with multilingualism. In fact, ASCII is not enough for even typesetting English at a professional level: various kinds of non-breaking spaces and hyphens, curly quotation marks “” instead of straight "", ligatures, etc. are all things that any professional English-language publisher requires but are beyond the ASCII set.
- gaius 8y agoThose can all be expressed in ASCII TeX
- Mediterraneo10 8y ago> Those can all be expressed in ASCII TeX So it isn’t enough that we have to be limited to ASCII, we have to be limited to only one of several typesetting engines as well? Your claim above that ASCII ought to be enough was already odd, but to defend it now you are going into even more absurd territory. Furthermore, TeX’s feature set does indeed include a few basics, but it still lacks some typesetting features later made available in Unicode. This is one reason why modern TeXnicians appreciate being able to typeset TeX-formatted documents with Unicode characters included thanks to xetex.
- frockington 8y agoWhat is the proper use of curly versuss straight quotation marks? Do they serve a purpose other than style?
- Mediterraneo10 8y agoThey provide some further visual disambiguation. But still, even if they are mere “style”, style matters. For long ages now those quotation marks – and many other features (take a look at e.g. Oxford University Press’s in-house style guide) – have been a feature of professional English-language typesetting. The public has grown used to them, and typesetting that fails to employ such things tends to look cheap and amateur (and therefore untrustworthy and not worth buying or citing) to a readership that publishers are trying to target.
- weberc2 8y agoI’m guessing computers will get really good at translating between a at least a handful of prominent world languages. Think a fantastic Google translate with a flawless UI.