On 11/30/05, Bob Braden <braden@xxxxxxx> wrote: > This issue has been brought up before and has been on our list of > things to worry about for at least two years. But we always run > aground on the following consideration: there is a substantial > constituency for have some least-common-denominator form of IETF > documents, so people can read and print them with even the most > primitive, old-fashioned (unfashionable?) tools. I agree that basic console tools should be all that's required to view the documents. That said, the current format is not easy to print with proper pagination on Microsoft Windows, so it is not perfect (as you know). I would characterize the current situation this way: "Some author names and Unicode protocol parameters are garbled for all viewers." I think it's reasonable to shoot for "Some author names and Unicode protocol parameters are garbled for some viewers." > Allowing extended > character sets for author names seems like a really nice idea to > the RFC Editor as well, but we see no way to do that and keep the > LCD. Hmm. What is the LCD? Is it NetBSD circa 1993? Is it a PDP-11? At what point does internationalization trump (vociferous?) users of long obsolete platforms? > You need some kind of structured document that some people > won't have the tools to display, search, print, ... The > RFC Editor would welcome a way out of this dilemma. http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/examples/quickbrown.txt So, which viewing tools fall over on that text file and need to be supported? I just tried it in Emacs, where most of the languages displayed correctly (I don't have East Asian fonts, so I got some squares), and Firefox displayed all of it correctly. -- Robert Sayre "I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time." _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf