Steve Yelvington on Nostr: When computers came along, they did not immediately solve the problem. The 7-bit ...
When computers came along, they did not immediately solve the problem. The 7-bit ASCII computer code set offered more possibilities, but it assumed you were writing in English. (The "A" stood for American.)
If you're older than 30 you may remember what a mess the Web was before the evolution of Unicode and widespread support for decent fonts. In theory, Unicode solves everything, but i still occasionally see text show up with junk characters where my browser can't figure out what was intended.
So what does this have to do with Vietnamese? The language is written in chữ Quốc ngữ (let's hope the diacritics stay put). It is a script based on the Latin alphabet with diacritics used to indicate pronunciation tone.
Vietnam's Lao, Thai and Khmer neighbors stuck with their own Sanskrit-based scripts, which you're not likely to see dropped into an English-language text. Instead, you'll see romanized transliterations (poorly standardized, which is the subject of an entirely different rant).
Most wire services have moved on from the 6/7-bit era, and in theory can easily represent text with rich diacritics. But print toolchains still may contain obsolescent pieces that don't understand the modern world, and font can be quite limited in what they can display.
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If you're older than 30 you may remember what a mess the Web was before the evolution of Unicode and widespread support for decent fonts. In theory, Unicode solves everything, but i still occasionally see text show up with junk characters where my browser can't figure out what was intended.
So what does this have to do with Vietnamese? The language is written in chữ Quốc ngữ (let's hope the diacritics stay put). It is a script based on the Latin alphabet with diacritics used to indicate pronunciation tone.
Vietnam's Lao, Thai and Khmer neighbors stuck with their own Sanskrit-based scripts, which you're not likely to see dropped into an English-language text. Instead, you'll see romanized transliterations (poorly standardized, which is the subject of an entirely different rant).
Most wire services have moved on from the 6/7-bit era, and in theory can easily represent text with rich diacritics. But print toolchains still may contain obsolescent pieces that don't understand the modern world, and font can be quite limited in what they can display.
/3