Re: [Pan-users] Annoying ? in posts

[Duncan]

Rhialto posted on Sat, 22 Sep 2012 00:15:00 +0200 as excerpted:

> The problem with Microsoft software is that it *often* claims to produce
> Latin-1 encoding (aka ISO-8859-1) but actually produces Windows codepage
> 1252 ("windows-1252"). Those are mostly the same, apare from the control
> characters from 128 to 159 (C1, I believe that range is called) which
> Microsoft has filled with cruft like the aforementioned "smart quotes".
> 
> If it were really Unicode that was produced, I believe that Pan would
> have no problem with it.

It's worth noting that the unicode handling code can be great, but if the 
configured font doesn't have the appropriate "glyphs" at the appropriate 
numeric locations, it's still not "gonna" display correctly.  There 
aren't a lot of fonts that cover the full range of N-thousand glyphs (tho 
combining technology, etc, can be used to compose a lot of glyphs using 
the combination of others).  Nearly all cover the 7-bit ascii subset 
because that's basic standard/essential on computers even when in Asian 
countries, and there's quite a few that cover all European and current 
letter-based languages (often with ancient Greek and Hebrew), some of 
which cover the most common East-Asian characters as well, but full 
current Asian glyph coverage is rare, as is full coverage of the 
specialist and historical glyph regions (Egyptian hieroglyphics, 
cuniform, pictorial-only symbols, etc.).

So even if you have a "proper unicode" font, it's likely that some 
characters will show up with the "missing symbol" symbol, if the 
characters are rare enough or in a unicode region not covered by that 
particular font.

That said, MS is indeed infamous for its abuse of charset standards.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
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