[bt-devel] RE: UTF-8 and new module classes

[Martin Gruner]

> When someone does hardcopy publishing, part of the mandate of the
> publisher is the selection of the look and feel of the document.
> The publisher selects paper, fonts, art, etc which becomes as
> much an important part of the document as the word content.
>
> Is it not also in our mandate to provide a BT "look and feel",
> which is part of the publishing of the modules?  

Well, I personally have to disagree here. We are not using hardcopy, but 
rather electronic documents. There is no paper, art, and as far as I know no 
module-specific font yet. The purpose of tools like bt is to work with the 
module, not basically to present it. The user should have the choice when it 
comes to fonts.

> What I mean by
> this is we could select a specific unicode set for each of the
> modules such that all of the modules 'work' together and give
> an artistically pleasing result.

I do not get what you are saying here, please help me understand.

> If the end-user decides to install other fonts and select them
> (instead of our defaults), the facility is present in BT.  But
> the user really should feel this unnecessary.  The only real
> adjustment that would typically be desired would be the point
> size, as the most common desktop variable will be the screen size.

No. Example: I have a greek module with a fontspecific encoding. I want to 
copy text into another app. No problem. But if I want to share the document I 
created, each user will have to install this particular font. No flexibility. 
Fonts should not matter, they are just descriptions of how the individual 
letters should be rendered on the screen. But they should not decide which 
letter to render (as happens in fontspecific encodings). If you use another 
font the doc will be messed up.
If there are reasonable standards, why not use them?

> Example, if we present a non-latin module, most end-users will
> not have a font that will necessarily present the module in
> a pleasing way.  We should provide the necessary font so that
> this module doen't look out of character with the rest of the
> modules installed.

> The reasoning: I am not a greek, but I use the greek modules for
> study and so the fonts are not on my system.  Or I am studying
> a German text but my machine is not really set up for a german
> locale and thus doesn't present the text well.  Why should I
> (as an end-user) care about all of this when really all I want
> to do is to study the module?

The solution is to make it in a way so that you will not have to install any 
font. You just need one iso8859-7 font (greek encoding) that you prefer. 
bibletime will then use your existing font to display the module.
Otherwise you might have to install 2 different fonts for 2 different greek 
modules.

Martin