Re: SPEC - Text

Gavin Nicol ([email protected])
Wed, 26 Apr 1995 10:52:10 -0400


>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.

This is correct, or to be slightly more accurate, we should provide a
mechanism that allows this (ie. does not actively hinder it).

>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.

I don't see why we should force the major portion of the worlds
population to represent text as polygons; especially as the symbols
they use to represent characters are so much more complicated than
western symbols.

I apologise for the flames, but honestly, I have spent the last 6+
months trying to get HTML-WG to a point where we have some real
international support, and I really don't relish the idea of repeating
the effort here. HTML-WG spent a long, painful, time understanding the
issues, partly because uninformed people commented authoritively, and
that required a period of "damage control", shall we say. As such, I
would like anyone ready to comment on this issue to spend time
learning about I18N *before* posting.