Re: Printing messages - Setting fontsize.
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On Tuesday, September 5 at 07:38 PM, quoth Derek Martin:
> Oh, come on Kyle, that's not really true. There are few systems in
> existence today which can't handle at least most of the Latin-based
> ISO standard character sets.
That statement is trivially false. Virtually every car, airplane, and
microwave out there has a computer in it these days, and very few of
them speak many standard character sets. Not to mention all the
financial systems (like the mainframes that still run the payroll at
several US universities) that nobody wants to upgrade. What I suppose
you meant is that there are few "desktop" systems that cannot handle
several charsets. This depends on your definition of "few", and also
on your definition of "cannot". As to the first, my university still
provides incoming CSE grad students with Sparcstations running Solaris
8. Maybe they're the only ones in the world with a few Sun boxes still
kicking around, but since I know many of the people using those
machines, that makes it an important demographic to me. As to the
latter, yes you can probably install enough third-party software onto
your Solaris 8 box to handle whatever charset you like, but that's a
pain. Indeed, many of my friends use the pine mailer, which stolidly
refuses to recognize any charset but us-ascii on all of their systems.
I understand that if they got the latest patches, and put some effort
into configuring things just so, they might be able to do better than
us-ascii (and I've told them so, and told them how, on multiple
occasions), but they have no interest. There are several professors in
my department that still use "mh" to read their email, which has no
knowledge of anything non-ascii (heck, just getting some of them to
handle MIME is a battle).
This is one of the reasons I like mutt: I can send whatever limited
form of email my intended recipient can read, and I can view whatever
bizarre forms of email that people send to me.
> UTF-8 *is* the standard... or at least *a* standard. Trouble is not
> everyone likes to comply to standards, and there is still a lot of
> crufty software out there. We'll get there. Maybe 2 more years.
Just because it's *a* standard doesn't mean much. EBCDIC is also *a*
standard, as is TCP-over-carrier-pigeon, but I don't see much of a
stampede to use either one.
Unicode is a character standard that is indeed quite useful and solves
several problems for OS people. UTF-8 is a useful sub-domain of that
standard. While I have no doubt that Unicode will be used for 90% of
all computer IO in new systems in two years, we will forever be
dealing with the systems and softwares of the past. About a year after
XP was released, Microsoft did a survey, and discovered that a large
percentage (on the order of 30%, but I don't remember the exact
number) of their installed user-base was still using Windows 95!
Why, just today I sent an email to my priest who it turns out is still
using Outlook Express 6.0. I sent in my usual format; UTF-8 with a
PGP/MIME detached signature. He complained that he couldn't view
either of my attachments (the only attachment was the signature;
Outlook treated the main body of the email as an attachment because it
didn't understand UTF-8).
~Kyle
- --
Many who claim to have been transformed by Christ's love are deeply,
even murderously, intolerant of criticism.
-- Sam Harris
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