<inline> Tom Petch ----- Original Message ----- From: "Iljitsch van Beijnum" <iljitsch@xxxxxxxxx> To: "John C Klensin" <john-ietf@xxxxxxx> Cc: "IETF-Discussion Discussion" <ietf@xxxxxxxx> Sent: Tuesday, June 20, 2006 12:18 AM Subject: Re: Image attachments to ASCII RFCs (was: Re: Last Call: 'ProposedExperiment: Normative Format in Addition to ASCII Text' toExperimental RFC (draft-ash-alt-formats)) > On 19-jun-2006, at 20:09, John C Klensin wrote: > > > (2) If I prepare an RFC draft using some mechanism which > > produces a document in form X, where X might include > <snip> > > Two prominent problems associated with the ASCII format are that it > doesn't really support formulas and figures. I was intrigued with the > earlier Unicode examples, so I decided to do some checking of my own > with regard to "unicode art" for figures. Have a look at: > > http://www.muada.com/drafts/utf8-art.txt > http://www.muada.com/drafts/utf16-art.txt > > I think this is closer to what an RFC with Unicode line art would > look like than trying to present an example in email. For me, the > UTF-8 encoding isn't immediately decoded properly by my browser, but > the UTF-16 version is. I also can't get this displayed properly on > the command line on my Mac. Still, it's not _too_ hard to have the > Unicode characters displayed properly. I agree in principle that adding a selected subset of Unicode would address the most pressing issues. But, for whatever reason, I get gibberish on both the URLs you give. By contrast, the figure embedded in an e-mail earlier displayed perfectly (until it got mangled when included in a reply). This suggests to me that the world is not quite ready for Unicode yet (I am using vanilla Windows software, as most of the world does:-(. Tom Petch The Unicode line art looks a > lot better than ASCII-only line art, but it shares many of the same > limitations, such as only (reasonably) being able to display > rectangular shapes and horizontal/vertical lines. There are some > exceptions such as the ability to use rounded corners, but true round > shapes or even usable diagonal lines don't seem to be supported. This > also means that it should be generally possible to convert from > Unicode to ASCII-only line drawings without much loss of information. > > There has been some talk about specifying a font for displaying > Unicode, but on my Mac at least, that doesn't seem to be necessary. > An important issue with different fonts is the difference in > character width for different characters, but the line art characters > are mostly the same width so this isn't an issue. However, the width > of the space character can vary, but there's probably a fixed width > space in the table somewhere. Also, it looks like there is only a > single glyph for these types of characters that is shared between > fonts. I.e., whether I use Courier or Times, the line drawing > characters look the same. > > It does seem to me that looking into Unicode for better formula and > drawing support makes a lot of sense. This allows us to make better > looking RFCs without radically changing the way RFCs are published. > > However, I think we probably want to change the process for other > reasons. I think it would be very useful to have the "source" of an > RFC available with style tagging and so on in order to more easily > derive future work. It's probably also a good idea to have "blessed" > PDFs or some similar format for pretty printing, especially for the > RFCs that contain formulas and drawings. And we may want to make > those formulas and drawings available as simple bitmap images so they > can be easily viewed on systems with limited capabilities. But with > all of that in place, it's probably a good idea to keep having the > ASCII version of RFCs be the normative version. > > Anyway, that's my $0.02 Canadian on this subject. > > _______________________________________________ > Ietf mailing list > Ietf@xxxxxxxx > https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf