Date: Sun, 16 Jun 2002 05:24:52 +0100 (WEST)
From: Laurent Siebenmann <sieben@cristal.math.u-psud.fr>
Message-Id: <200206160424.g5G4OqD09901@beryl.math.u-psud.fr>
To: CyrTeX-en@vsu.ru, vvv@vsu.ru
Subject: Re: Russian/Polish/German...without switching


Hi Vladimir and others

 > first, i wonder, how you can make a distinction (say color) in your 
 > editor for German A and Polish A for text files?? text files do not 
 > have any additional structure besides characters.

Knuth once threw a curveball in a TeX meeting by arguing that
font glyphs should include arbitrary default coloring; that ran
counter too all current work in TeX -- which imposed color by
external color-switch commands and (usually) a color stack.

Maybe I too am swimming against the current. But recently, most
operating systems have begun to invent new notions of font for
the coming era of 16 and 32 bit fonts.  I am daring to imagine
that some of the screen fonts will be able have default color
for the characters.  It is in such a world, that my notion of
the "stacked 16 bit multilingual" screenfont lives most
comfortably.

There would be no language switches in multilingual text.
Rather the parts of the big font for Russian, French and
English respectively would be disjoint and color coded.  If
keyboards are to stay roughly as they are today, one might
switch language with one of the dozen or more function keys
always available (mostly unused it seems). But such a switch
would still leave one in the same 16 or 32 bit font, and every
typed character would hopefully appear onscreen as a visually
recognisable glyph-with-color.  That is a simplistic scheme
that any typist instantly understands and every literate person
will know how to read.

There is a conceptual difference between the insertion of
switching commands and the use of "switched" type. Something
like the difference between a function and its derivative.
It makes a difference both to the typist/author and to the TeX
programmer-typographer.

At any rate, for the day I venture into the 16 bit font world,
as a multilingual manuscript creator I hope I will have
something as clean and simple to offer the typist, be that me
or a secretary.

I have still to argue that the lot of the
programmer-typographer for such "stacked multilingual typing"
can be a happy one.

Cheers

Laurent S.


PS.  Thanks for the hints on russification of emacs; I still
have to get up to speed in the emacs world. Emacs finally has
proved stable for me on Mac and Wintel. Since it is the one
(??) text editor working stably on Mac PC and linux it commands
attention -- in spite of a user interface with many
distressingly antedeluvian aspects.

PS.  Leif's report of how Nisus writer can realize the visual
aspects of the above typing using just the Macintosh font
technology of the 1980's and the color controls of the 1990's
is interesting and accurate (I believe). There is a free
version of Nisus Writer available at http://www.nisus.com.
Further, it would be possible to convert such Nisus typing to a
straight 16 bit text file (with a single font), modulo
programming a reasonably simple Nisus specific converter.