[10442] in Public-Access_Computer_Systems_Forum
Re: paean to ascii
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Thomas Dowling)
Tue Jul 23 20:14:49 1996
Date: Tue, 23 Jul 1996 18:50:28 -0500 (CDT)
From: Thomas Dowling <tdowling@ohiolink.edu>
To: Multiple recipients of list PACS-L <PACS-L@UHUPVM1.UH.EDU>
Reply-To: Public-Access Computer Systems Forum <PACS-L@UHUPVM1.UH.EDU>
----------------------------Original message----------------------------
> >If you want unlimited distribution, the only, at present, way to do a
> >good job of it is to use just plain ASCII, just like in this email.
> >
> >.........
>
> >There is only one real argument here. . .
> >
> >Elitist or Utilitarian. . .
Prof. Hart suggests that flat ASCII is the medium of the masses while the
"intellectual beltway" (whatever that means) is locking up information in
hoity-toity formats like PDF. So, basically, the choice to distribute
information electronically, the requirement to obtain a net connection and
access to a PC--not to mention things like universal literacy--don't
constitute terribly high hurdles, but the choice of one electronic format
over another sets off alarm bells. I'm not buying it.
[Well phrased comments on the readability of flat ASCII texts snipped.]
>
> One could argure about the way to go forward. PDF is one way but I don't
> think the power of the owner has much to do with it - it's interesting
> that even the mighty Microsoft did not seem to be able to get RTF
> established - perhaps because you can't read it.
My recollection is that Microsoft was not the giant it is now when they
came up with RTF. In the office applications market, they were poor
relations to WordPerfect, Lotus, and Ashton-Tate. In trying to catch up,
they tried a little of everything: support for a weird "mouse" thing in
Word for DOS, RTF, and a runtime version of a really wacky program called
"Windows" to run Excel. Obviously some worked better than others. :-)
FWIW, in some circles Word (for Windows) format is now a very common
document sharing format.
>
> I believe that a universally adopted extended ASCII with all the basic
> diacritical marks and printing punctuation is long overdue. I know when I
> first used a Mac, the ability to use real typographical quotes and real
> em-dashes was a thrill and every time I see a printed or word processed
> piece with "--" I cringe. Perhaps Unicode will come to the rescue. An
> extended alphabet still leaves out italic, bold etc. but perhaps some of
> the unused codes at the beginning of the ASCII sequence could be used.
I recently tried to diagnose a terminal emulation problem involving use of
Ctrl-O (ASCII character 15) in different telnet programs, and I can promise
you there are no unused ASCII codes. And any attempt to provide
international support is going to need thousands of characters. Unicode is
the only realistic option to handle the needed character sets.
Even at that, though, the character set is not the place to provide a rich
formatting environment. Bold and Italics are not going to meet the needs
of those documents which really *do* depend heavily on their formatting,
and I don't want to have to work with a character set that includes a
character for "landscape orientation, one inch margins, 2 columns with a
half-inch gutter, set body text 10/12pt Palatino (black), set headers 18pt
Avant Garde (red)."
Which is to say, I can't imagine any possible upgrade to ASCII (including
Unicode) which will remove the need for a format that does what PDF
attempts, whether or not PDF actually turns out to be that format.
Thomas ("OK, everyone--back to TeX!") Dowling
tdowling@ohiolink.edu
