Return-Path: Received: from [209.213.214.135] (account ) by vsu.ru (CommuniGate Pro WebUser 3.5.9) with HTTP id 945651 for ; Sun, 23 Jun 2002 09:07:05 +0400 From: "Vladimir Volovich" Subject: Re: Russian/Polish/German...without switching To: CyrTeX-en@vsu.ru X-Mailer: CommuniGate Pro Web Mailer v.3.5.9 Date: Sun, 23 Jun 2002 09:07:05 +0400 Message-ID: In-Reply-To: <200206230233.g5N2XrL23407@beryl.math.u-psud.fr> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="KOI8-R" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Hi Laurent, thanks for such a thorough answer. just a quick note for now: you write - > Another competitor is perhaps one Vladimir is backing. > Namely the unicode variant UTF8 with with (La)TeX language > switches. Real sixteen bit unicode requires Omega. But many > planes of unicode may be needed ie this not really 16bit... > but 32bit reencoded to 8bit. Does that not become tangled > and slow? As always, typing and screen viewing is a bad > bottleneck. I would emphasize that while Linux/unix is UTF8 > oriented, Bill Gates prefers unicode. you write "real 16-bit unicode" suggesting that UTF-8 is not a "real unicode", but that is not so. both UTF-8 and UTF-16 (and UTF-32) are equivalent in that they encode the same set of characters. UTF-8 is not worse than UTF-16 or UTF-32, and it is a real unicode, and there exists a one-to-one reencoding for either of these encodings. Pure TeX can handle UTF-8 in a relatively straightforward way (as the utf-8 and ucs LaTeX packages demonstrate), and the typographical quality achievable by pure TeX for UTF-8-encoded texts is in most cases not worse than for Omega (the drawbacks of TeX come from 8-bit fonts and impossibililites of cross-font kernings and ligatures, but this is rarely needed because most scripts can be put in one 8-bit font). Direct processing of UTF-16-encoded texts with TeX may be even possible, but definitely hard to implement (that's why Omega with it's OTP exists), but one an always re-encode the text from UTF-16 or UTF-32 to UTF-8 before processing it with TeX. Yes, Omega's goals look promising, but unfortunately the development of Omega is very slow and closed, and, which is more important, there is virtually no documentation (and there are also compatibility issues -- Omega is far from being stable). So having simple support in pure TeX for processing texts in UTF-8 encoding looks useful (of course the aim of the utf-8 packags is far from being a complete unicode covering package). Best, v.