Re: Xy & Ansi

[Guido Milanese MC1194@xxxxxxxx]

To: XYWRITE@xxxxxxxx

Subject:    XyWin - XyDos - Ansi
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In my message of two days ago I pointed out that a real problem of XyWin is the
lack of compatibility with the Ansi standard, and I remarked: "Unicode looks
now more a desire for the future than a reality".

    Nathan Sivin replies:
> What's that about Unicode? It has been available on the
> Macintosh for more than a year. You can use it for a number
> of esoteric languages already. That means that any file
> created in an old proprietary format in Chinese, etc., is
> obsolete and in a few years will be unreadable except for
> those who keep their out-of-date software releases. If it
> doesn't come to the PC's soon, there will be a mass wave
> of defectors.

    There are some Unicode applications in the PC planet (see Gamma
Production), but apparently they are not very good and they are still very
slow. This is the reason of my observation. However, you will agree with me, I
think, that a Windows application should be - at least -
Ansi compatible. With XyWin, a typical Windows operation, i.e. copying a
character or a group of chars through the
Clipboard, is often not possible, due to these limitations.
Only Ansi chars that are _also_ in the Ascii table can be imported. Besides
that, it seems to me that the huge table of characters of XyWin is not a good
idea, because it is not a real multilingual table, as Unicode, and it is
outside 'accepted' standars. For this reason, I still use
Lingua (NotaBene add-on for multilingual text processing).
Writing conversion tables from Lingua to Ansi codes is really easy.
    In other words: if Unicode is the real standard we must look at, as Mr
Sivin writes, Windows applications should move towards this standard as soon as
possible, period. But, _now_, Windows applications use normally Ansi codes, and
I think that Xy should do the same. A very trivial point, I know, but if you
need phonetic characters,
Greek and so on, this makes your life more difficult.

    gm

---------------------------
Guido Milanese
Universita' Cattolica      Internet: mc1194@xxxxxxxx
Ist. di Filologia Classica     smail: Largo Gemelli 1
+39.2.72342-750  Fax -740        I-20123 Milano MI