Re:Character to Glyph and Software Gimicks

["Dr.K. Kalyanasundaram" <kalyan@igcsun3.epfl.ch>]

Dear Muthu and Nagu:
Sorry for prolonging our debate on how to handle old style characters.

Muthu says:
>   It is my understanding that OpenType is quickly emerging as a
>   unified (TrueType + Type 1 + New technology) font format for
>   graphical desktops :  NT already has it, Win95 will, MacOS will
>   and Java will => this is almost 100% of the desktops on the
>   planet.
>   Without any software gimick, one will be able to construct a
>   glyph substitution table in OpenType fonts. 

If you do not mind me using harsh words (I am sorry for this),
the above statement of yours amounts to "selling half-baked potatoes".
I am totally against going for a scheme that depends on an emerging
technology (if it is not a software gimmick) that is not yet well 
established. Component statements such as "Win 95 will, Mac 
OS will, Java will,....one day really scare me.

As a software engineer working for a premieum computer company
you can see big breakthroughs coming around the corner. But
believe me, everytime there is a new edition of software that 
comes up, I try to update and go throw several computer hang-ups
and crashes. Mind you, this does happen even with Word 6 for Mac
from the venerable house of Microsoft. I had many chemistry files
in Word 5 that all got screwed up on Word 6 because Word 6 for
Mac turns out to be a crude import of Word 6 for Windows. They
are yet to provide a fix and so I am back to using Word 5.1 on Mac.
Half of the time web pages with Java applets hang up my Mac.
We all struggling hard to find simple ways to take Anjal to Mac.

I am still going around to help out a friend of ours - an old man in
late sixties with a 386 PC who want to go to internet and see what it
is all about. All internet service providers here provides packages that
run only on Windows. The memory in his PC is so low that if he
installs Windows there is hardly anything he can do. There are no
extra slots to increase the memory. He simply has to junk his PC
if he wants to go on internet. The poor man is living on his pension.

I insist on storing old-style characters as such in plain simple fonts
(if at all we are going to have them) with the present day technology
but NOT on some technology that will be there around the corner soon.

I can see your enthusiasm to go for a scheme that can be
implemented in the state of the art computer systems 
We have in the stores nearby selling only the state of the art
PCs (with pentium or Power PC chips with speeds exceeding 120 MHZ
with multimedia integrated etc etc). But out there in India and
elsewhere
there are many who still do what we may call primitive computing with
old 386PCs. Dr. Srinivasan already mentioned about receiving letters
even today from people who use these old systems. Why go far. Even
our good friend Sujatha uses  -what in today's standards - a old
computer.
Do you want to give him a package where he cannot engage in typing
old style scripts having old style characters?
So, my humble request is let us be realistic and go for a scheme that
can be implemented even on primitive machines without any hitch.
It can of use to anyone anywhere, particularly for those who are using
old computers in an environment where even the basic water and
electricity
supply are not guaranteed.
As Prof. Hart suggested, may be in a revision in a decade, we can go
for a scheme that will be heavily dependent on Open TrueType with
glyph substitution  and other emerging technologies. The technology
would have matured by then and also every one will have access to use
them.

Kalyan