On 14/02/2021 13:32, Mayayana wrote:
> "The Natural Philosopher"  wrote
>
> | > Not that it really matters. It's pretty much all ASCII.
> | >
> | >
> | Schrödingers cat would disagree - or ½ of him would.
> |
>
>    :) I always wonder how people end up using these characters.
> There are ways to do it. I can copy the character from existing
> text. On Windows I think there's Charmap, though I've never
> used it. Schrodinger will just have to get by without his umlaut.
> Just as "naive" has survived without one.
>
>    Then there's the matter of the mechanical entry system. My
> keyboard only has ASCII and a few extras.
>
mine (mint MATE) has  a caps lock key mapped to compose, so caps lock
-1-2 gives me ½

That takes care of most of what I need.


>    Where this really helps is with things like Chinese. But it only
> really helps them. For English speakers, we deal with pretty much all
> ASCII. And that's not the 1/2 of it. As you noted, if you want
> to write unicode you also need a unicode font. Browsers make
> it look simple, but for general text files it's not so simple. For
> example, I like to use Verdana for most text. But the font
> is not unicode. Windows will display UTF-8 as ANSI.
>
>    If I visit xinhuanet.com I see Chinese characters. (Even though
> it's all Greek to me.) If I check the source code I see Chinese. If
> I download that and open it in my code editor as UTF-8 with
> Verdana font, I see some of the languages. It looks like I'm
> getting Russian and Arabic, for example. But the Chinese is all
> little boxes. If I open it in Notepad, since it's plain text with no
> file header, it shows as English ANSI with lots of little boxes.
>
>    So it's a good solution for webpages, but once you get into
> entering, editing and storing multi-lingual text it gets very
> complicated. Only for those of us who speak English is it
> reasonable to say that UTF-8 makes everything easy. It does,
> but only because it's usually exactly the same byte string as
> ASCII. In fact, if I happen to come across
> UTF-8 text or HTML code I'll generally convert it to ASCII/ANSI
> for convenience. It's too much trouble trying to access it across
> different programs and displays at UTF-8. On Linux, where that's
> standard, it's fine. But we have to remember that this is
> representational file encoding. UTF-8 by itself is no miracle.
>
>    Microsoft are one of the sites that have used UTF-8 for years.
> It's all English on their English pages, but they spec it as
> UTF-8, use curly quotes and UTF-8 space characters. Neither
> is necessary and it complicates things. Both of these will work
> with an English codepage. The first should work anywhere:
>
> “curly &#nbsp; quotes”
> “curly   quotes”
>
>


--
Future generations will wonder in bemused amazement that the early
twenty-first century’s developed world went into hysterical panic over a
globally average temperature increase of a few tenths of a degree, and,
on the basis of gross exaggerations of highly uncertain computer
projections combined into implausible chains of inference, proceeded to
contemplate a rollback of the industrial age.

Richard Lindzen

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05