* Hebrew @ 2001-04-08 5:33 Robert C. Leif, Ph.D. 2001-04-08 6:52 ` Hebrew David Starner 2001-04-08 10:18 ` Hebrew Florian Weimer 0 siblings, 2 replies; 8+ messages in thread From: Robert C. Leif, Ph.D. @ 2001-04-08 5:33 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Comp. Lang. Ada From: Bob Leif I went to the World Wide Web Consortium Web site and looked up Hebrew and found this URL: -------------------------------- http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/WD-SVG-19991203/fonts.html (Section)20 Fonts Contents 20.1 Introduction 20.2 SVG fonts 20.2.1 Overview of SVG fonts 20.2.2 The 'font' element 20.2.3 The 'glyph' element 20.2.4 The 'missing-glyph' element 20.2.5 The 'hkern' and 'vkern' elements 20.3 DOM interfaces 20.3.1 Interface SVGFontElement 20.3.2 Interface SVGGlyphBaseElement 20.3.3 Interface SVGGlyphElement 20.3.4 Interface SVGMissingGlyphElement 20.3.5 Interface SVGKernBaseElement 20.3.6 Interface SVGHKernElement 20.3.7 Interface SVGVKernElement horiz-adv-x = "<number>" The horizontal advance after rendering a glyph in horizontal orientation. The default value is the value of the font's horizAdvX attribute. Glyph widths are required to be positive, even if the glyph is typically rendered right-to-left, as in Hebrew and Arabic scripts. ------------------------------------------------ I would like to see this type of functionality in Ada. However as a practical matter, the use of web technology to display Hebrew can be as above or as the Israelis are doing it. ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 8+ messages in thread
* Re: Hebrew 2001-04-08 5:33 Hebrew Robert C. Leif, Ph.D. @ 2001-04-08 6:52 ` David Starner 2001-04-08 10:27 ` Hebrew Florian Weimer 2001-04-08 10:18 ` Hebrew Florian Weimer 1 sibling, 1 reply; 8+ messages in thread From: David Starner @ 2001-04-08 6:52 UTC (permalink / raw) On Sat, 7 Apr 2001 22:33:29 -0700, Robert C. Leif, Ph.D. <rleif@rleif.com> wrote: > The horizontal advance after rendering a glyph in horizontal orientation. > The default value is the value of the font's horizAdvX attribute. Glyph > widths are required to be positive, even if the glyph is typically rendered > right-to-left, as in Hebrew and Arabic scripts. > ------------------------------------------------ > I would like to see this type of functionality in Ada. However as a > practical matter, the use of web technology to display Hebrew can be as > above or as the Israelis are doing it. What type of functionality? Right-to-left? It doesn't seem like that big a deal - wide_text_io could handle it right now, right? Personally, I'd find normalization functions to be more useful; rtl only matters when dumping to a terminal without higher-order protocols (curses should handle it for you, if and when anyone does serious work on UTF-8 compatibility), whereas normalization comes in handy when ever you run into Unicode text from the outside. -- David Starner - dstarner98@aasaa.ofe.org Pointless website: http://dvdeug.dhis.org "I don't care if Bill personally has my name and reads my email and laughs at me. In fact, I'd be rather honored." - Joseph_Greg ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 8+ messages in thread
* Re: Hebrew 2001-04-08 6:52 ` Hebrew David Starner @ 2001-04-08 10:27 ` Florian Weimer 2001-04-09 14:24 ` Hebrew Mike Brenner 0 siblings, 1 reply; 8+ messages in thread From: Florian Weimer @ 2001-04-08 10:27 UTC (permalink / raw) dvdeug@x8b4e53cd.dhcp.okstate.edu (David Starner) writes: > What type of functionality? Right-to-left? It doesn't seem like that > big a deal - wide_text_io could handle it right now, right? In the Unicode universe, handling right-to-left scripts correctly is mostly the job of the terminal, not of the application. Unicode stores characters in logical order, not in visual order. ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 8+ messages in thread
* Re: Hebrew 2001-04-08 10:27 ` Hebrew Florian Weimer @ 2001-04-09 14:24 ` Mike Brenner 2001-04-09 15:53 ` Hebrew David Starner 2001-04-09 18:37 ` Hebrew Florian Weimer 0 siblings, 2 replies; 8+ messages in thread From: Mike Brenner @ 2001-04-09 14:24 UTC (permalink / raw) >> What type of functionality? Right-to-left? It doesn't seem like that big a deal - wide_text_io could handle it right now, right? Florian Weimer wrote: > In the Unicode universe, handling right-to-left scripts correctly is mostly the job of the terminal, not of the application. Unicode stores characters in logical order, not in visual order. To expand on that, the renderer (terminal driver, print driver, etc.) is the component that goes back and forth, but some systems have directional attributes that tell the device driver when to go back and forth. See, for example, http://www.htmlhelp.com/reference/html40/attrs.html which shows how this is done for web pages using html 4.0 using the dir=rtl (direction=right2left) attribute. The point is that Ada would just be generating the string and the device driver would be interpreting the string; that is, the device driver would be making it switch to right2left mode, not Ada. BTW this is important for quite a few languages, not just Hebrew. It is fundamental for Arabic, Biblical Hebrew, Farsi, Ancient Greek, etc., per se. But many languages, like English, Hindi, Chinese, Japanese, etc., also use different directions of text when quoting right-to-left languages in the middle of left-to-right text, or when writing in columns or other than left-to-right paragraphs. ----- This is like the question of whether coding should be done in UTF-8 or use a 16-bit character encoding. UTF-8 has advantages for websites in simple English and most American emails. Various 16-bit codes have advantages for Asian languages, eCommerce encodings, multi-language web sites. The question is, is it important for English speaking people to make codings, software, web sites, advertisements, etc., that work well for people of many different languages? Or, to restate that question, is it important for Asia to use the same Unicode, the same character encodings, and ultimately, compatible web pages with Europe and the Americas? It is amazing that in 2001 the fonts that come with American computers and web browsers don't include most of Unicode yet. Mike ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 8+ messages in thread
* Re: Hebrew 2001-04-09 14:24 ` Hebrew Mike Brenner @ 2001-04-09 15:53 ` David Starner 2001-04-09 18:37 ` Hebrew Florian Weimer 1 sibling, 0 replies; 8+ messages in thread From: David Starner @ 2001-04-09 15:53 UTC (permalink / raw) On Mon, 09 Apr 2001 10:24:08 -0400, Mike Brenner <mikeb@mitre.org> wrote: > This is like the question of whether coding should be done > in UTF-8 or use a 16-bit character encoding. [...] > Or, to restate that question, is it important for Asia to > use the same Unicode, the same character encodings, and > ultimately, compatible web pages with Europe and the > Americas? You mean UTF-16? UTF-8's not the only encoding for Unicode. There's no problem using UTF-16 in areas that don't need to be ASCII-compatible. It's trivial to convert UTF-16 to UTF-8 with no loss of information or vice versa. > It is amazing that in 2001 the fonts that come with American > computers and web browsers don't include most of Unicode > yet. On one hand, it's not surprising at all; is it commericially reasonable for Microsoft to spend a lot of time for Cherokee, or the UCAS or polytonic Greek? How important is it that the average person, who knows no Japenese, has Japenese display correctly? On the other hand, they do - Windows comes with a nice set of fonts that each cover all the basic Latin, Greek and Cyrillic characters and provide full Unicode fonts for download from their website for free. Recent versions of Linux provide fairly complete Unicode BDF fonts. This is really starting to head off topic. I'll try to make this my last post on the subject. -- David Starner - dstarner98@aasaa.ofe.org Pointless website: http://dvdeug.dhis.org "I don't care if Bill personally has my name and reads my email and laughs at me. In fact, I'd be rather honored." - Joseph_Greg ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 8+ messages in thread
* Re: Hebrew 2001-04-09 14:24 ` Hebrew Mike Brenner 2001-04-09 15:53 ` Hebrew David Starner @ 2001-04-09 18:37 ` Florian Weimer 2001-04-09 19:23 ` Hebrew Brian Rogoff 1 sibling, 1 reply; 8+ messages in thread From: Florian Weimer @ 2001-04-09 18:37 UTC (permalink / raw) Mike Brenner <mikeb@mitre.org> writes: > BTW this is important for quite a few languages, not just > Hebrew. It is fundamental for Arabic, Biblical Hebrew, > Farsi, Ancient Greek, etc., per se. I believe that some languages (very Ancient Greek) use both writing directions alternatively. There isn't much software which supports that, if any at all. > This is like the question of whether coding should be done > in UTF-8 or use a 16-bit character encoding. UTF-8 has > advantages for websites in simple English and most American > emails. The robustness and statelessness of UTF-8 is helpful if you're using a Unicode-aware terminal in the UNIX environment. > Various 16-bit codes have advantages for Asian > languages, eCommerce encodings, multi-language web sites. There are many, manu national standards, and I think that's a problem. For a developer who is interested in internationalizing his software, it's very difficult to obtain all the necessary documentation. Implementing Unicode is probably much easier. > The question is, is it important for English speaking people to make > codings, software, web sites, advertisements, etc., that work well > for people of many different languages? Well, my native language is German, so my answer is yes, definitely. (However, I'm not sure about web sites and advertisements. Software, howver, should be able to cope with text in a multitude of languages, if it deals with text in any way at all.) > Or, to restate that question, is it important for Asia to use the > same Unicode, the same character encodings, and ultimately, > compatible web pages with Europe and the Americas? I think so. At the university, I think many students would be glad if they could use computers to read and write in their native language. We can't install software versions for 100+ languages, so it's important that existing software is internationalized. > It is amazing that in 2001 the fonts that come with American > computers and web browsers don't include most of Unicode yet. This might change quickly as Microsoft is rapidly embracing Unicode and is even implementing proper input methods, joining behavior etc. ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 8+ messages in thread
* Re: Hebrew 2001-04-09 18:37 ` Hebrew Florian Weimer @ 2001-04-09 19:23 ` Brian Rogoff 0 siblings, 0 replies; 8+ messages in thread From: Brian Rogoff @ 2001-04-09 19:23 UTC (permalink / raw) On 9 Apr 2001, Florian Weimer wrote: > Mike Brenner <mikeb@mitre.org> writes: > > > BTW this is important for quite a few languages, not just > > Hebrew. It is fundamental for Arabic, Biblical Hebrew, > > Farsi, Ancient Greek, etc., per se. > > I believe that some languages (very Ancient Greek) use both writing > directions alternatively. There isn't much software which supports > that, if any at all. Word for the day: "boustrophedon". > > Various 16-bit codes have advantages for Asian > > languages, eCommerce encodings, multi-language web sites. > > There are many, manu national standards, and I think that's a problem. > For a developer who is interested in internationalizing his software, > it's very difficult to obtain all the necessary documentation. > Implementing Unicode is probably much easier. > > > The question is, is it important for English speaking people to make > > codings, software, web sites, advertisements, etc., that work well > > for people of many different languages? > > Well, my native language is German, so my answer is yes, definitely. My native language is American English, and I agree with you. However, I suspect that for the kinds of SW I work on, mostly engineering SW, the answer today is no. Still, a general purpose language should provide the tools to implement internationalized software. -- Brian ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 8+ messages in thread
* Re: Hebrew 2001-04-08 5:33 Hebrew Robert C. Leif, Ph.D. 2001-04-08 6:52 ` Hebrew David Starner @ 2001-04-08 10:18 ` Florian Weimer 1 sibling, 0 replies; 8+ messages in thread From: Florian Weimer @ 2001-04-08 10:18 UTC (permalink / raw) "Robert C. Leif, Ph.D." <rleif@rleif.com> writes: > horiz-adv-x = "<number>" > The horizontal advance after rendering a glyph in horizontal orientation. > The default value is the value of the font's horizAdvX attribute. Glyph > widths are required to be positive, even if the glyph is typically rendered > right-to-left, as in Hebrew and Arabic scripts. > I would like to see this type of functionality in Ada. Why? This seems to have an application only in the highly specialized field of GUI, doesn't it? ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 8+ messages in thread
end of thread, other threads:[~2001-04-09 19:23 UTC | newest] Thread overview: 8+ messages (download: mbox.gz / follow: Atom feed) -- links below jump to the message on this page -- 2001-04-08 5:33 Hebrew Robert C. Leif, Ph.D. 2001-04-08 6:52 ` Hebrew David Starner 2001-04-08 10:27 ` Hebrew Florian Weimer 2001-04-09 14:24 ` Hebrew Mike Brenner 2001-04-09 15:53 ` Hebrew David Starner 2001-04-09 18:37 ` Hebrew Florian Weimer 2001-04-09 19:23 ` Hebrew Brian Rogoff 2001-04-08 10:18 ` Hebrew Florian Weimer
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