Newsgroups: sci.lang
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!das-news2.harvard.edu!news2.near.net!news.mathworks.com!news.duke.edu!news-feed-1.peachnet.edu!gatech!howland.reston.ans.net!EU.net!sun4nl!mcv
From: mcv@inter.NL.net (Miguel Carrasquer)
Subject: Re: TO MiquelC USING H
Message-ID: <Cy160J.74D@inter.NL.net>
Keywords: I hate 7 bit ASCII
Organization: NLnet
References: <37vl20$bru@grivel.une.edu.au> <384fui$up@kelly.teleport.com> <CxyAyq.5qJ@inter.NL.net> <3872c1$4uo@elaine.teleport.com>
Date: Fri, 21 Oct 1994 16:05:07 GMT
Lines: 28

In article <3872c1$4uo@elaine.teleport.com>,
George Dick <napoleon@teleport.com> wrote:
>We need someone who knows how to code to come up with a newsgroup reader 
>that would accept mixed ASCII and IPA, set a standard for the encoding, 
>that work out readers for other platforms.......

OK, so what we need is a way to encode ASCII/IPA, or, preferably,
Unicode (in practice, IPA is not used in this newsgroup as much as
actual spellings of words in just about any language).  This encoding
should use only ASCII 7-bit.  There are two options: use ASCII by default,
and an escape character to switch to "encoded", or encode everything.
For the latter, "uuencode" could do (although ASCII85Encoding, as used
in Postscript level II is a more effective method).

The bigger problem is indeed a newsreader that would correctly interpret
and post/display outgoing and incoming encoded data.  Only a few OS's support 
Unicode directly, others can display TrueType or Adobe fonts, and still others
are stuck with US-ASCII (or even EBCDIC, bless them).  And inputting 
extended characters is yet another problem...

I'd love to work on this, but I don't know if I'll have the time.
I'll think about it...  In any case, it's not something that can be
done by a single person.  Volunteers?

-- 
Miguel Carrasquer         ____________________  ~~~
Amsterdam                [                  ||]~  
mcv@inter.NL.net         ce .sig n'est pas une .cig 
