Re: How can I avoid unicode and use Latin1?

[Werner LEMBERG]

> > A. LilyPond actually _does_ support the Latin1 character set, as
> > Latin1 and Unicode coincide on the first 256 codepoints.
> 
> I don't quite see that.  If I put an e-acute (a byte of decimal
> value #233) in a LilyPond file, it is skipped -- it does not appear
> in the PDF output.  I have to put in the unicode equivalent, which
> is the two bytes #195 #169 (where 169 = 233 - 64) in order for
> LilyPond to give me an e-acute.  USASCII and unicode coincide on the
> first 128 codepoints, but from what I can see, Latin1 and unicode do
> not correspond on byte values #128 to #255.

You are mixing up Unicode with one of its possible representations,
UTF-8.  A Unicode character is a number between 0x0 and 0x10FFFF;
UTF-8 represents such code points as multi-byte sequences of varying
length, where the range 0x00-0x7F is identical to ASCII.

> Well, I have to admit it's hard to argue with that.  Despite the
> fact that I think that a lot of North Americans would like to have
> the direct Latin1 availability to which they have become accustomed,
> I know that at the least, Eastern Europeans would also want Latin2
> and Latin4.

Today, Windows uses Unicode exclusively -- even in North America.  You
won't have big success with latin1 files.

> Unicode only provides a way of specifying character codes for a wide
> variety of symbols in the interior of a text file.  But without font
> files containing the order of 64K symbols, the current fragmented
> font-file situation will continue to limit what can easily be output
> to a screen or a printer.

This is a very naïve view how Unicode works.  Having a font with 64K
glyphs is useless in most situations, given that Unicode represents
characters, not glyphs.

> > C. Unicode, not Latin1, is the future.
> 
> Maybe, but not in my lifetime.

Well, it is straightforward to use a converter like `iconv' within a
script which automatically transforms your latin1 file into UTF-8.


    Werner