Tales from the Archives

Sun Aug 19 14:03:19 CDT 2018

You and Alan both raise good issues and make good points. I'd mention a
couple of others.

When we started Unicode, there were not a lot of alternatives to a
general-purpose discussion email list for internationalization, but now
there are many. Often the technical discussions are moved to more specific
forums. There are interesting discussions on the identification of Unicode
spoofing (because of look-alikes) on a variety of forums dealing with
security, for example. I suspect many of the font rendering issues have
widespread solutions now (as Alan notes) and that discussions of remaining
issues have shifted to forums on OpenType. There are some very intense
discussions of Mongolian model issues, but those also tend to be handled in
different venues. Work on ICU / CLDR also tend to take place in many cases
in the comments on particular tickets, rather than in email lists.

The work of the consortium has also broadened significantly beyond encoding
and issues closely related to encoding. Here's a slide to illustrate that.
(The first 24 slides in the deck are to give people some context and
perspective on what the Unicode Consortium does before focusing on a
narrower issue.)

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1QAyfwAn_0SZJ1yd0WiQgoJdG7djzDiq2Isb254ymDZc/edit#slide=id.g38b1fcd632_0_166

Mark

On Sun, Aug 19, 2018 at 5:06 PM Alan Wood via Unicode <unicode at unicode.org>
wrote:

> James
>
> I think you have answered your own question: nearly everything works
> "out-of-the-box".
>
> Unicode is just there, and most computer users have probably never heard
> of it.  I routinely produce web pages with English, French, Russian and
> Chinese text and a few symbols, and don't even think whether other people
> can see everything displayed properly.
>
> Long ago, the response to the question "Why can't I see character x" was
> often to install a copy of the Code2000 font and send the fee ($10 ?) to
> James Kass by airmail.
>
> These days, Windows 10 can display all of the major living languages (and
> I expect Macs can too, but I can't afford one now that I have retired).
>
> Some of the frequent posters have probably passed away, while others (like
> me) have got older, and slowed down and/or developed new interests.
>
> Best regards
>
> Alan Wood
> http://www.alanwood.net (Unicode, special characters, pesticide names)
>
>
> On Sunday, 19 August 2018, 03:05:41 GMT+1, James Kass via Unicode <
> unicode at unicode.org> wrote:
>
>
> http://www.unicode.org/mail-arch/unicode-ml/Archives-Old/UML024/0180.html
>
> Back in 2000, William Overington asked about ligation for Latin and
> mentioned something about preserving older texts digitally.  John
> Cowan replied with some information about ZWJ/ZWNJ and I offered a
> link to a Unicode-based font, Junicode, which had (at that time)
> coverage for archaic letters already encoded, and which used the PUA
> for unencoded ligatures.
>
> At that time, OpenType support was primitive and not generally
> available.  If I'm not mistaken, the word "ligation" for typographic
> ligature forming had not yet been coined. IIRC John Hudson borrowed
> the medical word some time after that particular Unicode e-mail
> thread.  (One poster in that thread called it "ligaturing".)
>
> Peter Constable replied and explained clearly how ligation was
> expected to work for Latin in Unicode.  John Cowan posted again and
> augmented the information which Peter Constable had provided.  The
> information from Peter and John was instructional and helpful and
> furthered the education of at least one neophyte.
>
> Back then, display issues were on everyone's mind.  Many questions
> about display issues were posted to this list.  Unicode provided some
> novel methods of encoding complex scripts, such as for Indic, but
> those methods didn't actually work anywhere in the real world, so
> users stuck to the "ASCII-hack" fonts that actually did work.
>
> When questions about display issues and other technical aspects of
> Unicode were posted, experts from everywhere quickly responded with
> helpful pointers and explanations.
>
> Eighteen years pass, display issues have mostly gone away, nearly
> everything works "out-of-the-box", and list traffic has dropped
> dramatically.  Today's questions are usually either highly technical
> or emoji-related.
>
> Recent threads related to emoji included some questions and issues
> which remain unanswered in spite of the fact that there are list
> members who know the answers.
>
> This gives the impression that the Unicode public list has become
> passé.  That's almost as sad as looking down the archive posts, seeing
> the names of the posters, and remembering colleagues who no longer
> post.
>
> So I'm wondering what changed, but I don't expect an answer.
>
>
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