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If we were to do the simplest implementation (ISO8859-1 only support, with
left to right, top to bottom rendering) we would be supporting only about
a dozen or so Western European, North, Central and South American
languages. We would leave out all of Asia, some of Europe, the Middle
East, and much of the Pacific Rim.
To support all languages we would need to support the encoding and
rendering of glyphs other than those in the ISO8859-1 set. We would also
need to format the string (position the glyphs) in a way other than right
to left and top to bottom.
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Gavin, please correct any erroneous statement I've made above.
First of all, I wholeheartedly agree that my proposal is not a final
solution and it excludes the languages of many of the world's people. But
ethno-centric? An accusation like that makes it seem like I had some evil
intent in excluding those languages. It seems more ethno-centric to
accuse me of having little experience with I18N, because you apparently
believe that an implementation that includes only ISO8859-1 would not
support an international set of languages.
My concerns are purely and completely based on implementation difficulty
and that is my single and sole purpose for making the proposal I made.
As I see it we have 3 choices:
1) Implement nothing. All text would be represented as polygons.
2) Get out a simple text node which allows the compact representation of
text strings in a few languages (My proposal). Text in any other language
(and beveled text and any other effect not support in the text node) would
be represented polygonally.
3) Implement a fully internationalized text node with support for as many
languages as is humanly possible.
I believe choice (3) requires too much debate and is not a candidate for
VRML 1.0. So we are left with 2 choices: Put in a simple but incomplete
text node or put in nothing.
Even with all its flaws, I'd still vote for choice (2). There are ALOT of
cases where it will make a file much smaller.
Other opinions???
PS - I have seen the light and have quieted down my signature...
-- chris marrin | "As a general rule, don't solve Silicon Graphics, Inc. | puzzles that open portals to Hell." (415) 390-5367 | - excerpt from "A Horror Movie [email protected] | Character's Survival Guide"