[Pythonmac-SIG] TECManager

[Jack Jansen]

On Friday, September 26, 2003, at 02:19 AM, Sarwat Khan wrote:

> On Thursday, September 25, 2003, at 06:32  PM, Jack Jansen wrote:
>> 1. Why do you use TECManager in stead of Python's builtin unicode 
>> support?
>
> I haven't used Bob's TECManager but I'll second its usefulness. 
> Apple's text encoding support is far more functional than Python's, 
> including support for just about any script system in use on Windows 
> and on the Mac. If you go to Safari's View > Text Encoding menu, 
> you'll see a list of popular text encodings used on the web. Several 
> of them aren't available in Python, such as Traditional Chinese.

Ok, point taken. Then I think what we (this is the "we" as in "someone, 
probably not me":-)
should do is add TEXManager support to Python unicode support. This 
would mean that on
the Mac the unicode converters will use TECManager (unless explicitly 
instructed
otherwise) and on other platforms it will use the standard method. 
Which may
be less complete, but at least work.

This has two advantages over using TECManager explicitly:
1. Code developed on other platforms and brought over to the Mac will 
automatically
understand the MacSanskrit and other esoteric character sets
2. Code written on the Mac is more portable to other platforms, and
much more readable to Python programmers without Mac-knowledge.

I've looked at plugging Apple's Text Encoding stuff into the Python
unicode codec architecture in the past and it looked doable.
--
Jack Jansen, <Jack.Jansen at cwi.nl>, http://www.cwi.nl/~jack
If I can't dance I don't want to be part of your revolution -- Emma 
Goldman