Article View: comp.fonts
Article #713Re: Why Unicode is 16-bit
From: Glenn A. Adams
Date: Tue, 08 Sep 1992 16:35
Date: Tue, 08 Sep 1992 16:35
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In article <1992Sep6.222220.14143@coli.uni-sb.de> ulma@coli.uni-sb.de (Ulrich Mayring) writes: >Then why not go on to 32 bit? It would come a lot closer to including ALL >characters of ALL languages. (BTW does anybody know if 32 bit would suffice >or would we need still more? Assuming we only wanted to include spoken >languages, not dead ones) 32-bits are *not* needed, 16-bits suffices for representing the primary content of *all* languages, both modern and archaic. Of course, 32-bits might be useful for glyph encodings; but Unicode doesn't encode glyphs. [Note: 16-bits only suffices when a compositional approach is allowed, such as is the case with Unicode and ISO10646; i.e., to represent the textual information displayed as LATIN CAPITAL G WITH CIRCUMFLEX, the two Unicode characters LATIN CAPITAL LETTER G and NON-SPACING CIRCUMFLEX are employed. There is no need to encode all combinations of formal elements as single encoding units.] Glenn Adams
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Path: arc1-ca.pugleaf.net!sparky!uunet!spool.mu.edu!darwin.sura.net!jvnc.net!yale.edu!think.com!paperboy.osf.org!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!ai-lab!wheat-chex!glenn From: glenn@wheat-chex.ai.mit.edu (Glenn A. Adams) Newsgroups: comp.fonts Subject: Re: Why Unicode is 16-bit Message-ID: <27618@life.ai.mit.edu> Date: 8 Sep 92 16:35:37 GMT References: <1992Sep4.203521.4099@adobe.com> <72065@apple.Apple.COM> <1992Sep6.222220.14143@coli.uni-sb.de> Sender: news@ai.mit.edu Organization: MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Lines: 21