Re: Two patches, and a file to remove

Subject: Re: Two patches, and a file to remove
From: Martin Vermeer (martin.vermeer@fgi.fi)
Date: Thu Aug 10 2000 - 10:39:41 CDT

On Thu, Aug 10, 2000 at 04:14:29PM +0200, Karl Ove Hufthammer wrote:
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Martin Vermeer" <martin.vermeer@fgi.fi>
> To: <abiword-dev@abisource.com>; <patches@abisource.com>
> Sent: Thursday, August 10, 2000 11:41 AM
> Subject: Two patches, and a file to remove
>
>
> | Hi, here are three (small) contributions.
> |
> | 1. The attached patch corrects some LaTeX output symbols that
> | should be in math mode (surrounded by $$), and adds
> | 0x201e = "below double quote" as a symbol. Furthermore \ldots
> | was implemented for 0x2026.
>
> Great!
>
> | I also added 0x201e to the HTML output. My browsers don't render &bdquote;
>
> You mean &bdquo;, right? &bdquote; is not a valid character reference.

Right, &bdquo;.

> | as they are supposed to -- seems to be pretty new. So I chose ,, for
> | representation.
>
> Not so great. If your browser doesn't render U+201E, then that's a problem with
> your browser (or your fonts).

It appears to be a browser problem. It just prints &bdquo;.

My browser (Mozilla M17) does, and most future
> browsers will. Mozilla (and Navigator 6) renders the U+201E character correctly,
> even if you use a font which doesn't have a glyph for it (a glyph from another
> font is used). IE 5(.5) renders it if the font has a glyph for the character.
> Lynx renders it as a ". The solution for is not to use ',,' as this will cause
> several problems. One is that it's not the right character, and therefore
> doesn't *look* very good (similar to using << for «).
>
> The most serious problem is that it *loses* information. When the U+201E
> character is converted to ',,' we have no way of knowing what the original
> character was. ,, is not the same as U+201E, and browsers won't treat it the
> same way. A couple of examples:

[...]

I agree with all that. So what is policy? Cater for older browsers? Or for
newer (better) standards?
 
> What I've written here goes for *all* Unicode characters. There's no need
> "reduce" them to similar-looking characters.

Unfortunately wv/text.c contains _already_ some examples of that. If we
follow your policy, that should be fixed too.

So what to do? I am happy either way.
 
> --
> Karl Ove Hufthammer
>

Martin 

-- 
Martin Vermeer mv@fgi.fi   Phone +358 9 295 55 215   Fax +358 9 295 55 200
Finnish Geodetic Institute    Geodeetinrinne 2    FIN-02430 Masala FINLAND
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