Hello!
So? Most computer systems aren't aware of the history of their text.
Take ASCII for example, most of us know what and why it was created.
Also the code page CP437. But do the machines care? I suspect not.
-----
Gregg C Levine gregg.drwho8 at gmail.com
"This signature fought the Time Wars, time and again."
On Wed, Dec 18, 2013 at 3:28 PM, Sampsa Laine <sampsa at mac.com> wrote:
sampsa <sampsa at mac.com>
mobile +44 7961 149465
On 18 Dec 2013, at 22:12, Gregg Levine <gregg.drwho8 at gmail.com> wrote:
Hello!
What's wrong with ordinary English characters, and all upper case? It
wasn't until the development of the computer, that teletypes suddenly
found themselves speaking upper and lower case.
-----
I think you'll find they're LATIN characters, derived from the Etruscans,
who got their script from the Greeks who in turn got it from Byblos, Lebanon,
AKA Jbeil. Great little town, pretty girls, good food and awesome little
corner bars in the medieval souq.
sampsa <sampsa at mac.com>
mobile +44 7961 149465
On 18 Dec 2013, at 22:12, Gregg Levine <gregg.drwho8 at gmail.com> wrote:
Hello!
What's wrong with ordinary English characters, and all upper case? It
wasn't until the development of the computer, that teletypes suddenly
found themselves speaking upper and lower case.
-----
I think you'll find they're LATIN characters, derived from the Etruscans,
who got their script from the Greeks who in turn got it from Byblos, Lebanon,
AKA Jbeil. Great little town, pretty girls, good food and awesome little
corner bars in the medieval souq.
Hello!
What's wrong with ordinary English characters, and all upper case? It
wasn't until the development of the computer, that teletypes suddenly
found themselves speaking upper and lower case.
-----
Gregg C Levine gregg.drwho8 at gmail.com
"This signature fought the Time Wars, time and again."
On Wed, Dec 18, 2013 at 2:59 PM, Sampsa Laine <sampsa at mac.com> wrote:
On 18 Dec 2013, at 21:58, Dennis Boone <drb at msu.edu> wrote:
I say screw this and we all learn Phoenician and standardise on that!
Hieratic Ancient Egyptian or go home. :)
Bit too high class for me, I'm more of a Gubal kinda guy - Phoenicia FTW.
Besides, they still have nice bars in the souk.
On 18 Dec 2013, at 21:58, Dennis Boone <drb at msu.edu> wrote:
I say screw this and we all learn Phoenician and standardise on that!
Hieratic Ancient Egyptian or go home. :)
Bit too high class for me, I'm more of a Gubal kinda guy - Phoenicia FTW.
Besides, they still have nice bars in the souk.
On Dec 18, 2013, at 2:47 PM, Sampsa Laine <sampsa at mac.com> wrote:
...
Who needs vowels anyway? They're for children.
They sure seem to be plenty of vowels in Finnish!
paul
On 18 Dec 2013, at 21:20, Dennis Boone <drb at msu.edu> wrote:
Are these encoded as four separate characters or is the renderer
meant to figure out the ligatures and render the correct form of MEEM
when presented with it from memory?
In both 8859-6 and unicode, there is one code point for the letter, and
the renderer is to figure out which form belongs at that place in the
text.
It appears that xterm isn't really able to do this. It may also screw
up the Unicode bi-directional algorithm, since I see the Arabic
characters in L-R order. Not sure if one could sort this out by
embedding RLE/PDF characters; my unicode entry setup is in a state of
disarray due to upgrades.
I say screw this and we all learn Phoenician and standardise on that!
Who needs vowels anyway? They're for children.
Are these encoded as four separate characters or is the renderer
meant to figure out the ligatures and render the correct form of MEEM
when presented with it from memory?
In both 8859-6 and unicode, there is one code point for the letter, and
the renderer is to figure out which form belongs at that place in the
text.
It appears that xterm isn't really able to do this. It may also screw
up the Unicode bi-directional algorithm, since I see the Arabic
characters in L-R order. Not sure if one could sort this out by
embedding RLE/PDF characters; my unicode entry setup is in a state of
disarray due to upgrades.
De
On 18 Dec 2013, at 18:58, Johnny Billquist <bqt at softjar.se> wrote:
I'd say it's safe to assume that VMS do not do any advanced stuff that you're looking for now, Sampsa. You might have a separate application that can understand all this, but VMS itself do not. In general, each byte is one character, and once output, it stays.
Any rendering of characters differently depending on position will either have to be done inside the terminal, or else by special software in VMS, which is not a part of any normal piece.
What a shame, mind you Microsoft Word couldn't figure this out until about 2007 and the Terminal.app on my Mac still can't join letters.
On 2013-12-18 17:50, Sampsa Laine wrote:
On 18 Dec 2013, at 18:37, Dennis Boone <drb at msu.edu
<mailto:drb at msu.edu>> wrote:
Does VMS support Arabic text in the console (VT-series terminals etc)
or graphical modes (X11)?
In about 1983, I did some work on VMS 3.x systems in Riyadh. The user
terminals were Tandberg 2200 family devices with Arabic language
support. I don't recall there being anything special about the
installed VMS: it had no significant localizations in terms of system
messages, etc. We were able to do mixed English and Arabic text on
these terminals using standard system utilities (EDT), COBOL
applications and the Cincom Total database. The terminals operated on a
set-shift model, and it seems like maybe the | character was the shift.
Everything was single-byte character sets. IIRC the terminals dealt
with the Arabic positional shifting character forms.
I suspect this isn't exactly what you're looking for, though.
De
It might be actually, I'd love to be able to type Arabic on my VMS
boxes, we're getting a retrotech crowd together in Egypt and Lebanon.
The problem with Arabic is that each letter has up to four shapes
depending on its position in the word, i.e. the initial, medial, final
and independent.
So for example the letter MEEM ( - looks like a little circle with a
vertical line hanging off it, sometimes) looks like this when attached
to a SEEN ( - three small vertical bumps):
Independent:
Initial (MEEM-SEEN):
Medial (SEEN-MEEM-SEEN):
Final (SEEN-MEEM):
Are these encoded as four separate characters or is the renderer meant
to figure out the ligatures and render the correct form of MEEM when
presented with it from memory?
I've attached a PNG of the example above in case some of you guys don't
have Arabic fonts :)
I'd say it's safe to assume that VMS do not do any advanced stuff that you're looking for now, Sampsa. You might have a separate application that can understand all this, but VMS itself do not. In general, each byte is one character, and once output, it stays.
Any rendering of characters differently depending on position will either have to be done inside the terminal, or else by special software in VMS, which is not a part of any normal piece.
Johnny
