Text in OpenFormula - inadequate for international use

[Alex Brown <alexb@griffinbrown.co.uk>]

Dear all,

3.2 Text:

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A text value (also called a string value) is a sequence of zero or more characters.  

Evaluators should accept [UNICODE] strings, but shall accept strings of ASCII (Unicode U+0020 through U+007F, inclusive) characters.
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Consider an ODF document, which contains a spreadsheet cell with an accented character (e-acute say), and a string function operating on that cell.

By the above text, it appears a conforming OpenFormula implementation need not accept such a document, since only ASCII support is required.

If so, I think it is unacceptable for an international standard (any standard, frankly) not to have basic support for international text required as a basic required provision. If a group of people wish to have a private agreement to use a ASCII only, then they might do that (and such usage would be compatible with full Unicode, so we lose nothing by this) - but such parochial western-biased usages should not be standardized.

A thorough pass should be made of the text to remove references to ASCII text (except for legacy purposes) and rebase text representation and handling on Unicode.

- Alex.

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