Talk:Unicode/Archive 4

message: Are there any characters to the Unicode code points U+FDD0 - U+FDEF assigned? --84.61.23.172 09:47, 23 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  Please, don't ask that kind of questions here. This page is about the content of the article and nothing else. Mlewan 12:53, 23 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  I disagree with you about the purpose of talk pages. It is a very good place to ask questions about the topic (and I have seen it used much for this purpose in the past, to the benefit of those involved, and often of benefit to the article as well). If you don't want to answer them, you can ignore them. - Rainwarrior 19:19, 3 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  You use "you" for two persons here. I added the comment above but never removed anything. You can check the history if you want to see who removed what. The initial question was lazy and does not add anything to the discussion. If 84.61.23.172 had simply read the article and followed the links, s/he would have found the answer. The question below is different. The answer is not obvious and it is at least possibly interesting. Mlewan 19:46, 3 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: (Yes, the edit comments were addressed to the person who reverted the addition of the second question. The talk page comment was only addressed to you. Sorry if that was confusing.) I wouldn't have commented if you had just said "you can find easily this information in the article" to the person, but you said "this page is about the content of the article and nothing else", so I took it to mean just that. - Rainwarrior 19:54, 3 July 2006 (UTC)

text:  It's not a very good place to ask questions about the topic. It's inappropriate and distracts people actually working on the article. If it were one or two questions, it wouldn't be a big deal, but this is needlessly bloating the talk page. You go anywhere and start asking a lot of questions that show you haven't done your homework, ignore the mission of that group of people, and ignore anyone who tries talking to you about better ways of doing things, you're going to be considered rude. Frankly, I think he's a troll, the way he always has more questions the instant the last one is answered and never gives any explanation. If not, he's just horribly rude and demanding.--Prosfilaes 00:45, 4 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Definately a troll.  I firmly approve of removing this user's comments when they're of no relevance to the content of the page.  It'd be a different matter if the amount of pointless questions asked wasn't trolling. It's as if the user has a list of Top 100 Unicode questions and reels one off when there has been a large time gap or as soon as the last one has been answered.  Sukh | ਸੁਖ | Talk 00:51, 4 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Ah, I hadn't looked at the rest of the page. I'm sorry. I retract any of my earlier statements. Treat this guy however you will. - Rainwarrior 01:45, 4 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Noncharacters U+FDD0 - U+FDEF 

message: To use one of the available unicode fonts (in your computer) to display the unicode special characters existing on web pages, then, if you are using that special char inside a table or chart or box, specify the class="Unicode" in the table's TR tag (or, in each TD tag, but using it in each TR is easier than using it in each TD), in wiki table code, use that after the (TR equivalent) "|-" (like |- class="Unicode"). For individual case, template code  for each character can also be used. you may use HTML decimal or hexadecimal in the place of char. If a paragraph with lots of special Unicode chars needs to be displayed, then  ...  code can be used. Thanks. ~ Tarikash 22:42, 14 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Displaying Unicode Characters 

message: Can something be done to improve this table? The reader is left to figure out for themselves the correlation between the bolding and italicising and which codepoint ranges are included in the subsets. I presume that bold means it is in WGL-4, italics that it is in MES-1 (actually, there don't appear to be any examples of this), bold italics that it is in both WGL-4 and MES-1 and that all mentioned codepoint ranges are included in MES-2. Is this right?  I'm still not sure why in the F0 line, 01-02 are given in parentheses. Perhaps there is another scheme (like using colours) to make all this clearer (and not quite so ugly)? Is there a particular reason the table was forced into a different font to the rest of the article? And finally, the notes [1] and [2] in the title don't seem to do anything (their content seems to only appear when you edit them). (I note from the history that the table was originally inserted by User:Crissov back in April.) Thylacoleo 03:06, 23 August 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I've tried to improve the lead-in text and the table heading. Comments, corrections and (especially) improvements are welcome. Cheers, CWC 08:43, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

text: I'm not sure why this table is even here at all - yay, some old piece of software supports their own proprietary set of extensions (intensions?) of Unicode. What value does it serve here? Shouldn't it be in the NT article or WGL or MES one or something? --moof (talk) 07:10, 26 December 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  WGL-4, MES-1 and MES-2 table 

message: I'm tempted to delete the entire section "Input methods". They are essentially unrealted to Unicode. --Pjacobi 22:33, 25 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Input methods??? 

message: I've been searching all over on how to update my PC's unicode registry, as very few non-keyboard characters appear as anything other than boxes, but to no avail. Can anyone tell me how I do this? (Also, might be something to incorporate into the article) --Nintendorulez talk 20:58, 21 October 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I never heard of a PC's "unicode registry". Usually when unusual characters appear as boxes the problems are in the font or the application settings or the document itself. Which characters do you look for in particular? Chinese? Russian? Which application do they not appear in? Internet Explorer? MS Word? Firefox? What kind of documents have you tried? HTML? Text? Word? Which operating system do you have? Windows? MacOS X? Linux? Mlewan 22:02, 21 October 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  I need a bit of help... 

message: I went to tidy up a recent edit to the "Origin and development" section of the article, and ended up rewriting the whole section. Here's what I came up with.
:By the late 1980s, character encodings were available for many of the world's writing systems. However, those encodings are mutually incompatible and most are only useful in particular regions of the world. Moreover, writing software that can use multiple encodings is quite difficult. (For instance, in ISO/IEC 2022, the meaning of a byte depends on all the bytes preceding it.)
:Unicode was developed as a solution to this problem: a single character encoding that includes all existing encodings, covers the whole world, and can encode texts in which arbitrary writing systems are mixed together.
:The Unicode standard also includes a number of related items, such as character properties, text normalisation forms, and bidirectional display order (for the correct display of text containing both right-to-left scripts, such as Arabic or Hebrew, and left-to-right scripts).
:===Design Principles===
:Unicode encodes the underlying characters — graphemes and grapheme-like units — rather than the variant glyphs (renderings) for such characters. It assigns a unique code point — a number, not a glyph — for each character. In other words, Unicode represents a character in an abstract way, and leaves the visual rendering (size, shape, font or style) to other software, such as a web browser or word processor. In the case of Chinese characters, this sometimes leads to controversies over distinguishing the underlying character from its variant glyphs (see Han unification).
:To encourage the use of Unicode, its designers also emphasised round-trip compatibility: any text in a standard encoding can translated to Unicode and back with no loss of information. For instance, The first 256 code points were made identical to the content of ISO 8859-1, making it trivial to convert most existing western text.
:The tension between these two goals has required some compromises. In many cases, essentially identical characters were encoded multiple times at different code points to preserve distinctions used by legacy encodings, for the sake of round-trip compatibility. For example, the "fullwidth forms" section of code points encompasses a full Latin alphabet that is separate from the main Latin alphabet section. In Chinese, Japanese, and Korean (CJK) fonts, these characters are rendered at the same width as CJK ideographs rather than at half the width. For other examples, see Duplicate characters in Unicode.
:Also, while Unicode allows for combining characters, it also contains precomposed versions of most letter/diacritic combinations in normal use. These make conversion to and from legacy encodings simpler and allow applications to use Unicode as an internal text format without having to implement combining characters. For example é can be represented in Unicode as  (Latin small letter e) followed by U+0301 (combining acute) but it can also be represented as the precomposed character U+00E9 (Latin small letter e with acute).
The main changes I'm aware of (it's late here) is mentioning ISO/IEC 2022 and round-trip compatibility. Does anyone think this go in the article? Cheers, CWC(talk) 17:50, 27 October 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Redrafted "Origin and development" section