On Apr 3, 2005, at 9:40 PM, Idris Samawi Hamid wrote:
Hi guys,
Ok, I certainly did _not_ intend to start a flame war, was just dreaming out loud:-)) Idris,
no flame war intended! I know that we have very similar interests (btw: how's "critical editions in ConTeXt" doing?), that's why I stated what I feel about it. (For the manual: have you looked in your inbox lately?) During the last weeks, I have written a perl script to create an automatic encoding vector for ttf (Unicode) fonts with Greek letters. I have spent way too much time on it. It works reasonably well, but I always have to look at things and correct stuff manually. Font designers are too [insert favorite swearword here] to give decent names to their glyphs, and since we need those names for the encoding, it's hard to make things happen automatically. Fonts claim to follow the Unicode standard, but then have glyphs in the wrong place. Some designers even modify the standard Adobe names, so you can't even use the normal ec or texnansi-encoding.
I have even more difficult issues with Arabic;-)
Yeah, I can believe that.
Hmm, seems we've heard the same comment about Linux in the pre-KDE days:-)
Tell you what: I think right now the same is true for linux. As long as you're satisfied with the standards some distribution gives you, you might get past the CLI. But try to integrate a piece of unusual hardware, or modify settings, and presto, you need the terminal and a basic understanding of Unix.
Seriously, there is room in the TeX world for a creative gui approach, and ConTeXt would be a much better candidate than LaTeX for that to work. Yes, this is just a dream for now...
Well, let's dream and not take this further. Bedtime over here in Europe... All best Thomas