Re: [office] Fwd: [odf-devel] ODF & ITS

["David A. Wheeler" <dwheeler@dwheeler.com>]

> Is there any encoding that can represent characters that cannot be 
> represented in UTF-8?

No.  All Unicode positions can be represented using UTF-8.

Some buggy implementations of "UTF-16" don't support
character numbers beyond 65535 (the "Basic Multilingual Plane"),
but those are bugs.

In retrospect, I think the "Han unification" was a mistake.
We don't think the letter "Sigma" and "S" are the same character, and saying
"well, they're just different glyphs for the same character" is nonsense.
If humans don't recognize two different glyphs as "the same", then
they are NOT the same; the endless yammering of apologists does
not end the reality.  As a practical
matter, the "unification" means that Unicode by itself DOES NOT
represent the character set of languages... you ALSO have to specify
the font used, yet Unicode has no way of representing the font :-(.
But complaining about the spec is pointless; there are no REAL
altnernatives to Unicode.

And... OpenDocument fixes this problem of Unicode, because
the XML _includes_ a reference to the font!

--- David A. Wheeler