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List:       kde-i18n-doc
Subject:    Russian, Japanese, Greek, Chinese, Korean documentation and Unicode
From:       Eric Bischoff <ebisch () cybercable ! tm ! fr>
Date:       1999-11-07 13:57:08
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Hello,

I think it is time for me to explain my position with respect to Unicode and
new DocBook format of documentation.

This message is mainly directed to the two Chinese teams, the Greek team, the
Japanese team, the Russian team and the Korean team, but it is also of interest
for anyone using latin languages, and especially the ones usiang diacritical
marks (almost any latin language excepted english ;-) ). Hebrew and Arabic are
not used for documentation yet (mainly because of right-to-left direction
problems), but they are concerned as well.

1 - Unicode is a new standard

Therefore, you may not find it as easy to handle as other file encodings (ISO,
BIG5, EUC, KOI, GB2312, etc). But it's growing in importance and we should
definitely move to it :
- it does not depend on the platform (MacOS, Windows, Unix) like extended
ASCIIs. Only for the French language, I have encountered about a dozen different
encodings ! This must stop.
- It is clean, simple, well structured and well documented.
- It allows to mix every language in the same file. It is ONE SINGLE ENCODING
FOR ALL LANGUAGES ON EARTH.
- It is supported by Qt, DocBook tools, modern Web browsers like Netscape, and
nearly all the new programs that appear now.
- It does not take much more room as other standards if we use it in its UTF-8
version (variable length code). UTF-8 is identical to ASCII for non-accentuated
latin characters.
- It is an ISO standard, does not belong to any vendor, and is supported by the
major industrial actors.

2 - I would like the DocBook files to be in Unicode

This DOES NOT MEAN that the files we generate MUST be in Unicode. We can still
produce HTML files (for example) that are in KOI-8R or in EUC-JP. Of course, we
can also output UTF-8 HTML for people wanting it.

I know that now, for example, 90% of the Web files are in KOI for Russian for
example. But 1) this could change, 2) we should look towards the future, not
the past, 3) there are conversion tools from and to every encoding and 4) we
can provide both standards.

I suggest that we work internally in Unicode and in KOI or EUC for the end
user. We can ask every translator to install unicode-aware tools. We can't ask
all KDE end-users to do it !

We don't have to move to Unicode right now ! Moving to from LinuxDoc
to DocBook is enough work for the time being ;-). So in a transitional phase we
can have DocBook files encoded in the old way.

In any case NOBODY will be forced to move to Unicode if he/she doesn't want
to. I'm not a dictator. I just hope to make you aware of the growing
importance of this standard and move smoothly, in full cooperation, to this
encoding. We will always ensure that all the tools are available for the new
encoding FIRST.

I hope this message helps to understand my position and removes some
unjustified fears.

Eric

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