Bowerbird@aol.com writes:
in the meantime, my viewer-tool will actually _display_ all those accented characters, even when they are not present in the e-text, if the user chooses that option. (it's all about user-choice for me.) if you want to help with that, create a list of such accented words.
Such a feature never would have occured to me. Toggle accents that aren't in a text? How many users have told you that they want to toggle accents? If you knowlingly strip out accents you give up any claim to have created a faithful and accurate edition of a text. Sorry but that's blown your credibility right there and drops your text down to the level of a bootleg Harry Potter translation[1]. Why is this so important? It's the old game of whispering a sentence into someone's ear and then they repeat it to someone else etc. After passing through a few people the sentence get's mangled. Unicode is very much ready for prime time. Hell, Unicode is even supported by Xterm. Man pages on Red Hat Linux use Unicode. If the command line in a unix terminal window uses Unicode, it's everywhere. b/ Footnotes: [1] BTW. Usually the Harry Potter translations come out a good few months after the English version so there is a real market for quicky translations for people who can't bear to wait and can't read the English. My wife can't read English very well, and she bought a bootleg translation of the second book in Thai. We compared the first few pages with the English edition and she said it was so horrible that she could wait for the official Thai translation which is quite good. I also saw a bootleg of Goblet of Fire in Chinese which came out a week after the English edition was published! From the look of it, it had been done in Shanghai. That's a 636 page book translated, printed and shipped to where I found it in the dingy dark dusty market stalls in Beijing in a week! Looking through the book you could see very distinct shifts in writing style and vocabulary every few pages. Even the translation of the names of some of the characters changed slighlty a couple of times in the book. They must have chopped up the book and split the translation between scores of translaters to do it in a day or two. -- Brad Collins <brad@chenla.org>, Bangkok, Thailand