Diacritics and ASCII

[jbjc@xxxxxxxx (Jerry Bernstein)]

DickWeltz wrote:

>The
> y-dieresis may be categorized with the tooth fairy and easter bunny eggs.
>

  It's one thing to dismiss the affectations of stage personalities
and so on, and another to minimize this limit on the typographical
freedom of a user of word processing or dtp programs.
  Not to mention that in Spanish, for example, one finds capital Y
in names like "Ysidro". Gerard Manly Hopkins depended to some extent
on unusual rhythmic patterns, often called out with funny - to us -
accents, and on the *oddest* syllables,
  Let's not forget, we're quarreling over a pie - extended ascii,
256 possibilites - whose claimants increase as the square of the
number of members of the UN.
  Desktop systems are trying to emulate typsetting systems, at a
minuscule fraction of the cost. Now you can get 2400 dpi on a printer
without busting your budget i.e., under $10K. But there are still
limitations. the ideal in typsetting is to be able to put any character
in the font in any location on the printable surface. Post Script was
a big step for us all, and the font desginers have been more creative
than ever.
  When Unicode is as common as 32MB on everybody's desktop, we'll put
diereses over ens with tildes, or cedillas under the palatal el in
Polish. my son wrote a thesis on Dvorak, and went nuts trying to find
a font that had a hachek, or even figure out some way to concoct one,
without a font-design program. he uses a macintoid, because he writes
music and ... you know the rest.