Okay I'm putting in my vote for UTF8. It is the coding I use all the time, and it works great with all screen readers as long as we are dealing with characters in the first Unicode sheet. Screen readers work perfectly with such characters, although many of them do not come by default with pronounciation dictionaries for all characters. It is not really relevant to the present discussion, but FYI, the trouble for screen readers comes in pronouncing characters in higher sheets. This gets out of my range of expertise really fast. The only characters that I have ever needed to pronounce that are not in the loest sheet are math characters that are bold, italic, Fraktur, etc. For me, it meant that I could not use them in LEAN Math, but this is a minor nuisance at best. I use Notepad and Notepad++ as my text editors, and both work perfectly well with UTF8. I am really quite surprised to hear that there are still text editors in use that do not do UTF8. It is the most common coding in use in western countries today. UTF16 is a bit more efficient for Chinese and other such languages, but UTF8 does work for those. John G -----Original Message----- From: liblouis-liblouisxml-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:liblouis-liblouisxml-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of John J. Boyer Sent: Tuesday, July 03, 2012 1:32 PM To: liblouis-liblouisxml@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: [liblouis-liblouisxml] Re: [liblouis] r715 committed - the last batch of files converted to utf-8. Hi Mesar, I would be interested to see an editor for Linux that works at the command line and supports UTF-8 conveniently. However, i want to see more of a consensus. So who else wants UTF-8 in the character argument of opcodes? It might be a good idea to start a new thread with this question. John On Tue, Jul 03, 2012 at 06:00:06PM +0100, Mesar Hameed wrote: > On Tue 03/07/12,11:17, John J. Boyer wrote: > > I feel that it is important that the tables should be human-readable > > and editable with simple text editors. > > Human readable is exactly one of the cases why we should move to utf8. > \xhhhh is not really readable. > If i write the word "hello" as: > > word \x0068\x0065\x006c\x006c\x006f 125-15-123-123-135 > > Its not really readable. > Of course "hello" here is just an example to illustrate what has to be done for non a-zA-z languages. > > > unicode is now an old and established standard, and is used for the > majority of documents across the web, many simple editors support this out of the box. > > If you like we can help you to find an editor that will work with your tools and utf8 at the same time? > > > > I don't care that it doesn['t look pretty. > > The point that Christian and I are trying to make is that \xhhhh > doesnt look very readable to us :) > > > It makes things easier for people who have to maintain tables after the original author is finished with them. > > That second person popping up is probably going to be another person > from that country, and will be able to read their letters using their screenreader much easier than having to match \xhhhh representation to individual letters. > If it was a sighted person, they are even less likely to find the \xhhhh mapping intuative. > > > Finally, I don't think it is a good idea to suddenly change a way of > > writing tables that has been used from the beginning. > > The question is not suddenly, its a question of evolution over time to match changing needs. > Before, most of liblouis customers were either european or american, > which were served either by ascii or latin1, but with free screenreaders and with lower costs for accessible materials and devices, we have to accommodate for new users. > > My intention is not to be irritating, but simply expressing my view and feeding back to the project what I get from other sources. > Remember I sit on fences, I have people wanting and regularly asking > to have braille support both in nvda and orca for their languages, so > I decided to volunteer time to liblouis because it is a worth while project. > I am sure braille embossing in native languages or mixed language texts is also often requested. > > Our list of tasks still includes adding 21 indian languages, and as of yet an uncounted numberof african languages. > > Thanks for understanding. > Mesar > For a description of the software, to download it and links to project > pages go to http://www.abilitiessoft.com -- John J. Boyer; President, Chief Software Developer Abilitiessoft, Inc. http://www.abilitiessoft.com Madison, Wisconsin USA Developing software for people with disabilities For a description of the software, to download it and links to project pages go to http://www.abilitiessoft.com For a description of the software, to download it and links to project pages go to http://www.abilitiessoft.com