Re: Wasteful internationalization

["Björn Persson" <spam-away@nowhere.nil>]

Stephen Leake wrote:

> That's a "small box" on my display. Apparently I'm missing that font.
> 
> Which is a good reason to not use such characters in programs. How
> many people would know how to install the right fonts? (hint; not me
> :) And how do you figure out what fonts they will need?

I don't see the problem.

There are two cases: Characters that the program itself uses, and Unicode
text data that the program processes and displays. The first case might
apply to a physics program that uses certain mathematical symbols. This is
no different from dynamic linking. You have complete control over which
characters your program uses, so you know what fonts it needs just like you
know what libraries it needs. For Windows the common practice is to
distribute all the necessary DLLs with your program. (At least I think it
still is. I don't follow the events in the Windows world very closely.)
Just handle fonts the same way – distribute them with the program. The
modern Unix-like operating systems that I know anything about are typically
based on some kind of package manager that handles dependencies. When
packaging the program you specify which library packages it depends on, and
the user's package manager will ensure that they are installed. Again, just
handle fonts the same way – make the program depend on the necessary fonts.

The second case applies to web browsers, email and Usenet clients, word
processors and so on. These programs should ideally be able to display any
Unicode character. That's impossible in practice as long as Unicode is
growing. Users may also prefer not to have so many fonts installed. You
might not want to have 60000 Chinese characters occupying disk space if you
can't read Chinese anyway. This is no reason to limit these programs to
ASCII. They're much more useful with Unicode support and an incomplete set
of fonts than with only ASCII support. They just need to cope with missing
fonts and display something else instead – and that's exactly what they do.

> I assume these problems will eventually be solved. But I don't trust
> Microsoft to solve them in a nice way ("the program you are trying to
> compile requires font foobar. Please deposit $20.00 to download it" :).

Yes, some fonts cost money, as do some libraries. There are also free and
gratis fonts, just like there are free and gratis libraries.

-- 
Björn Persson                              PGP key A88682FD
                   omb jor ers @sv ge.
                   r o.b n.p son eri nu