academic Unicode experts

Today I find an academic Unicode expert who has the very errors he warns of in his own web page and who fails to declare the char‐encoding of that page : Unicode quote marks !

I suggest supplementing what he says with the advice on Unicode quotation in languages other than English :  wp.

But if the PC is not a typewriter – and only programmers need ASCII ` ' and " – then why not TEXT keyboards for users and APL‐style programmer keyboards for those who script, hack and program ?

As for hyphen and dash, those topics are linked in the wp article in its right‐side panel.

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Firefox Perapera for Kanji

I am finding that my two pages testing edict and edict2 as UTF-8 encoded text are also a great test of the Perapera Japanese-English dictionary plug-in for the Firefox browser.

Of course, the plugin required the compilation of the dict ... but it clearly hints at more uses for the content of EDICT2 than as some single text file out on a server.

I have posted two versions of each of EDICT and EDICT2 as HTML pre text:

edict white-on-black
edict black on white
edict2 w/b
edict2 b/w

Kanji dict plugins to read an English gloss are available for your web browser.

Note: each page may take a moment to load as there are some 162,000+ entries.

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Jan Zwicky, Wittgenstein and Form

I was thinking that had PART ONE had the single line page headers and PART TWO had double-line page headers ... too obvious? A one unit and then a two unit length line as page headers? Golden ratio lengths? Imagine the unexplained subtle elegance of the book without the PART pages themselves being required as partitions.

§
What about a poem which opens with a left indent to

I wonder if it is the case that 

    [and then stanza(s),
    finally ending with
    a right indented ]

        I think that it is so.

Imagine starting to see this as a recurring form in poetry magazines, anthologies.

A paradigm case of  the ugly: a single quote from misguided Ernest Gellner Words and Things, 1st Ed. ?

Dal segno al coda would require us to use U+1D10B as the non-printing HTML UNICODE escape sequence &#1D10B;

The printer or the author was selective in the LW segno chosen?

It was not the segno

Repeat:

And then to the coda.

ObjectIcon 2.4 and Cygwin make

ObjectIcon 2.4 is available at code.google.com/p/objecticon

This is the Icon language of the late Ralph Griswold and others as extended by Robert Parlett with class-based objects and Unicode.

If you are a Windows user with Cygwin as your gcc build environment, you will have to recall how to apply env var changes to the current shell: ObjectIcon comes with a handy paths.sh file which will only be of use if run as

.  ./paths.sh

where the initial dot ensures that a script not using exit will have its variables export into the scope of the current shell in which it will run.  Just running the script will not set the var's for ObjectIcon to use.

This way you are able to pick up the ObjectIcon env vars such as OIHOME without adding them into a bash rc file or the like.

On my system that paths.sh file is

# Object Icon path settings

export OIHOME="/cygdrive/i/objecticon-2.4"
export OIBIN="$OIHOME/bin"
export OILIB="$OIHOME/lib"
export OIPATH="$OILIB/main:$OILIB/gui:$OILIB/xml:$OILIB/parser:$OILIB/ipl"
export OIINCL="$OILIB/incl"
PATH="$PATH:$OIBIN"
LD_LIBRARY_PATH="$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:$OILIB/native"
export TRACE OIMAXLEVEL

UNICODE accented vowels for Russian

I have just discovered that my posts to this blog are unable to display accented Russian as in displaying

Еврейская автономная область

as

Евре́йская автоно́мная о́бласть

which should have appeared with accents over one vowel per word as high-lighted below:

Еврейская автономная область

as an aid to pronounciation for foreigners and as disambiguation of some words for Russians themselves.

The editor for blogspot shows no sign that there will be a problem.

To test, be sure that your browser's encoding option is set to at least utf-8.

ObjectIcon is UNICODE ICON

There are recent updates to code and wiki by Robert Parlett over at the google code ObjectIcon project including UNICODE in ICON.

ucs (standing for Unicode character string) is a new builtin type, whose behaviour closely mirrors that of the conventional Icon string. It operates by providing a wrapper around a conventional [...] Icon string, which must be in utf-8 format

For SVN, you might want to use
svn checkout http://objecticon.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ objecticon-read-only

The lack of UNICODE in UNICON has been a worry: now there is an ICON + OOP alternative. UNICODE arrived recently in swi-prolog and is now in the alpha of REBOL3.

Languages which parse strings but are not UNICODE by 2010 cannot be of much interest in their intended niche in China, India, Malaysia, Indonesia ...

Using gedit with the Tcl/Tk IDE for SNOBOL4

Over at my Curl blog I've added on note on using gedit as the external editor with a nice simple IDE for SNOBOL, the original pattern-matching language intended for computer users. That blog entry also has a link to an object extension to ICON which permits UNICODE strings.