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I use GNU Unifont, with a user-space virtual terminal. Some of GNU Unifont has looked far from "pretty good". I overlay K16-1990, 9x15, and Ubuntu Monospace o

by JdeBP 8y ago

I use GNU Unifont, with a user-space virtual terminal. Some of GNU Unifont has looked far from "pretty good". I overlay K16-1990, 9x15, and Ubuntu Monospace on top of it for better-appearing characters. * http://jdebp.uk./Softwares/nosh/user-vt-screenshots.html#Unicode http://jdebp.uk./Softwares/nosh/user-vt-screenshots.html#Uni... * http://jdebp.uk./Softwares/nosh/guide/terminal-resources.html#fonts http://jdebp.uk./Softwares/nosh/guide/terminal-resources.htm... Your multilingual console is really far from "perfect". Aside from the aesthetics of GNU Unifont, you do not have good multilingual input, which you have completely left out. You don't have an ISO/IEC 9995 common secondary group. You do not have CJKV input methods. You still have problems with modifier keys becoming stuck "on" because of VT switching races. * https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/494685/5132 https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/494685/5132 And you also still have ISO/IEC 2022 8-bit character set switching for messing things up. (-: * https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/506140/5132 https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/506140/5132

AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
Because English is already well suited to it, is it incredibly ethnocentric of me to believe that instead of trying to shoehorn the complexities and eccentricities of existing written text into the digital medium we should have instead adapted the writing systems to the medium so they'd be simpler to both represent and input? Because every time I look at what it takes to properly support unicode I'm pretty damn thankful ASCII is more than sufficient to represent my language.
- yorwba 8y ago
  It's not ethnocentric, it's programmer-centric. If you consider supporting Unicode hard, imagine the effort required to get everyone to learn a new writing system and transliterate all existing works into it. At least Unicode support only requires a handful of specialists to create the necessary tooling, rather than some global uprooting of existing traditions.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
    I think you over estimate the cognitive effort required. Just look at how quickly emoji were adopted into every-day communication. Maybe you can't transliterate Shakespeare into emoji very effectively, but some meaning is lost just reading it in modern English anyway and we could reserve the more complex systems for this kind of preservation.
    - yorwba 8y ago
      Emoji work because they're optional. If people were forced to communicate exclusively in emoji to use some particular software, most potential users aren't going to bother with the effort and will choose a competitor instead.
      - AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
        I think I've expressed my point unclearly: emoji are an adaptation of our communication patterns to the medium. Real time textural communication could not express things we were used to expressing in other real time media via tone of voice or body language, so we adapted how we communicate those things to the media. Indeed writing itself is an adaptation of language to a new medium.
- gumby 8y ago
  The point of our machines is to help humans, not the other way around. I was saddened when Spain changed Spanish sorting to make life easier for PC programmers in the 90s. Within only a couple of years that effort became pointless, but was now encoded in law.
  - ufo 8y ago
    What did they change?
    - Someone 8y ago
      I guess this refers to this: ”Spanish treated (until 1994) "CH" and "LL" as single letters, giving an ordering of cinco, credo, chispa and lomo, luz, llama. This is not true any more since in 1994 the RAE adopted the more conventional usage, and now LL is collated between LK and LM, and CH between CG and CI. The six characters with diacritics Á, É, Í, Ó, Ú, Ü are treated as the original letters A, E, I, O, U, for example: radio, ráfaga, rana, rápido, rastrillo. The only Spanish-specific collating question is Ñ (eñe) as a different letter collated after N.” (Copied from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphabetical_order#Language-specific_convention https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphabetical_order#Language-sp...)
      - gumby 8y ago
        Indeed, and the justification at the time was because contemporary software got it wrong. I remember it well.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
    > The point of our machines is to help humans, not the other way around. While this is true, significant amounts of friction are caused by being unwilling to adapt to the medium's nature. What would writing look like if we had tried to encode sound waves directly onto paper? Instead we adapted our communication to the medium.
    - gumby 8y ago
- JdeBP 8y ago
  I suggested some falsehoods that programmers believe about telephones a while back (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19215636 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19215636). There is a case for falsehoods that programmers believe about ASCII, starting with: * It's 8-bit. (It's 7-bit.) * It is sufficient for English. (Ð ð Þ þ) * It is sufficient for Modern English. (zoölogy coöperate £ née resumé) * It at least has everything that one could type on a typewriter. (½ ¼ ¢ , and that's just starting with some contemporary 20th century U.S. typewriters from IBM such as the Selectric) * It is sufficient for the U.S., at least. (Not for the U.S. Library of Congress in 1969 it wasn't. It needed 174 characters for catalogue cards, per https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2FBF02404378 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2FBF02404378 .) * It was used by Multics. (Multics used a modified version, padded out with leading zero bits and replacing DEL with PAD. See http://web.mit.edu/saltzer/www/publications/multics/bc-2-01.pdf http://web.mit.edu/saltzer/www/publications/multics/bc-2-01.... .) * It does not have broken vertical bar. (It was in the 1968 standard at 124, a broken bar because the PL/I language people did not want their unbroken vertical bar to be in the then "national variant" range. https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html/L7rD197ldIw/RdAbL31DjAwJ https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.infosystems.www.authori... http://jkorpela.fi/latin1/ascii-hist.html#7C http://jkorpela.fi/latin1/ascii-hist.html#7C ) * It does have broken vertical bar. (It was replaced in the 1977 standard by an unbroken vertical bar at 124. Then some subsequent 8-bit character sets in the 1980s re-introduced a broken vertical bar in a second position, with much ensuing hilarity.) * It did not have arrows. (In the original standard ↑ and ← were where ^ and _ now are, for some consequences of which see https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/a/9201/1932 https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/a/9201/1932 .) * It is the same as ECMA-6. (ECMA-6:1991 allows national-language variants in several code positions. The standard ASCII characters in those positions are merely the "International Reference Version" and one possibility from amongst several in ECMA-6. See https://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecma-006.htm https://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ec... .)
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
    So in actual fact English was adapted to the medium, albeit minimally.

by JdeBP 8y ago

AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago

Because English is already well suited to it, is it incredibly ethnocentric of me to believe that instead of trying to shoehorn the complexities and eccentricities of existing written text into the digital medium we should have instead adapted the writing systems to the medium so they'd be simpler to both represent and input? Because every time I look at what it takes to properly support unicode I'm pretty damn thankful ASCII is more than sufficient to represent my language.

yorwba 8y ago
It's not ethnocentric, it's programmer-centric. If you consider supporting Unicode hard, imagine the effort required to get everyone to learn a new writing system and transliterate all existing works into it. At least Unicode support only requires a handful of specialists to create the necessary tooling, rather than some global uprooting of existing traditions.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
  I think you over estimate the cognitive effort required. Just look at how quickly emoji were adopted into every-day communication. Maybe you can't transliterate Shakespeare into emoji very effectively, but some meaning is lost just reading it in modern English anyway and we could reserve the more complex systems for this kind of preservation.
  - yorwba 8y ago
    Emoji work because they're optional. If people were forced to communicate exclusively in emoji to use some particular software, most potential users aren't going to bother with the effort and will choose a competitor instead.
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
      I think I've expressed my point unclearly: emoji are an adaptation of our communication patterns to the medium. Real time textural communication could not express things we were used to expressing in other real time media via tone of voice or body language, so we adapted how we communicate those things to the media. Indeed writing itself is an adaptation of language to a new medium.
gumby 8y ago
The point of our machines is to help humans, not the other way around. I was saddened when Spain changed Spanish sorting to make life easier for PC programmers in the 90s. Within only a couple of years that effort became pointless, but was now encoded in law.
- ufo 8y ago
  What did they change?
  - Someone 8y ago
    I guess this refers to this: ”Spanish treated (until 1994) "CH" and "LL" as single letters, giving an ordering of cinco, credo, chispa and lomo, luz, llama. This is not true any more since in 1994 the RAE adopted the more conventional usage, and now LL is collated between LK and LM, and CH between CG and CI. The six characters with diacritics Á, É, Í, Ó, Ú, Ü are treated as the original letters A, E, I, O, U, for example: radio, ráfaga, rana, rápido, rastrillo. The only Spanish-specific collating question is Ñ (eñe) as a different letter collated after N.” (Copied from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphabetical_order#Language-specific_convention https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphabetical_order#Language-sp...)
    - gumby 8y ago
      Indeed, and the justification at the time was because contemporary software got it wrong. I remember it well.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
  > The point of our machines is to help humans, not the other way around. While this is true, significant amounts of friction are caused by being unwilling to adapt to the medium's nature. What would writing look like if we had tried to encode sound waves directly onto paper? Instead we adapted our communication to the medium.
  - gumby 8y ago
JdeBP 8y ago
I suggested some falsehoods that programmers believe about telephones a while back (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19215636 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19215636). There is a case for falsehoods that programmers believe about ASCII, starting with: * It's 8-bit. (It's 7-bit.) * It is sufficient for English. (Ð ð Þ þ) * It is sufficient for Modern English. (zoölogy coöperate £ née resumé) * It at least has everything that one could type on a typewriter. (½ ¼ ¢ , and that's just starting with some contemporary 20th century U.S. typewriters from IBM such as the Selectric) * It is sufficient for the U.S., at least. (Not for the U.S. Library of Congress in 1969 it wasn't. It needed 174 characters for catalogue cards, per https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2FBF02404378 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2FBF02404378 .) * It was used by Multics. (Multics used a modified version, padded out with leading zero bits and replacing DEL with PAD. See http://web.mit.edu/saltzer/www/publications/multics/bc-2-01.pdf http://web.mit.edu/saltzer/www/publications/multics/bc-2-01.... .) * It does not have broken vertical bar. (It was in the 1968 standard at 124, a broken bar because the PL/I language people did not want their unbroken vertical bar to be in the then "national variant" range. https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html/L7rD197ldIw/RdAbL31DjAwJ https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.infosystems.www.authori... http://jkorpela.fi/latin1/ascii-hist.html#7C http://jkorpela.fi/latin1/ascii-hist.html#7C ) * It does have broken vertical bar. (It was replaced in the 1977 standard by an unbroken vertical bar at 124. Then some subsequent 8-bit character sets in the 1980s re-introduced a broken vertical bar in a second position, with much ensuing hilarity.) * It did not have arrows. (In the original standard ↑ and ← were where ^ and _ now are, for some consequences of which see https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/a/9201/1932 https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/a/9201/1932 .) * It is the same as ECMA-6. (ECMA-6:1991 allows national-language variants in several code positions. The standard ASCII characters in those positions are merely the "International Reference Version" and one possibility from amongst several in ECMA-6. See https://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecma-006.htm https://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ec... .)
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
  So in actual fact English was adapted to the medium, albeit minimally.