Text-mode apps (Was :Who are the "spacists"?)

[Mikhail V]

On 2 April 2017 at 00:22, Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Apr 2, 2017 at 8:16 AM, Mikhail V <mikhailwas at gmail.com> wrote:
>> For multiple-alphabet rendering I will use some
>> custom text format, e.g. with tags
>> <s="Voynich"> ... </s>, and for latin
>> <s="Latin">...</s> and etc.
>>
>> Simple and effective.
>
> For multi-alphabet rendering, I would rather use an even simpler
> format: Remove the tags and use a consistent encoding.

No, flat encoding would not be simpler, it would be simpler only and only
if you take a text with several alphabets, and mix the data randomly.
In real situation, data chunks that use different glyph sets for
representation are not mixed in a random manner.
Also for different processing purposes tagged structure will be way
more effective, e.g. if I want to extract all chunks in alphabet A
in a single list with strings, or use advanced search, etc.

>
> Have you ever actually *used* a system of tagged encodings? It is an
> abomination.

Not with such encodings (exept my own experiments), but in some sense,
I use it every day, e.g. in rich text format (Word, InDesign), you
have bold text or
italics text - in internal representation it is like tagged text, and
adresses different glyph sets. Yes those are [probably] unicode values,
but the application deals with those tags at rendering and copy-pasting.
IOW such applications technically could cope with encodings
in similar manner without problems.