Tear-eyed in Philadelphia....

[George Hart <ghart@socrates.berkeley.edu>]

Hal, I am devastated!  Now, I also learned Tamil with the old-style
spelling, and I used to be quite partial to it.  But once I got used to the
new style, I not only realized it is more logical and easier to teach, it's
also easier to read.  Several of the old-style characters are
insufficiently differentiated from other characters -- especially R and n +
long a.

But there's hope, and perhaps we can all take comfort and our tears will
dry up.  What we need is not glyphs, not character encodings, not
standards, but PICTURES, which (as we all know) are worth thousands of
words.  Yes, we need to do graphic scans of old manuscripts and
coffee-stained cards that contain precious bits of knowledge scribbled in
orange pencil between the stains.  Then we can have it all!  We can even do
color scans!

This is actually a serious suggestion.  As we all know, prices for storage
continue to drop, and it is actually practical nowadays to scan important
documents (I do it all the time -- if I make an important, coffee-stained
note to myself, I pop it into my Visioneer scanner and save it -- I
invariably lose the actual note; yes, I have the new one that does color).

Now if you're sentimental, you've got to admit this is a great solution.  G.