suzmccarth wrote:

> I was suddenly enlightened. Peter Daniels doesn't know how things
> are encoded in Unicode and what terms are being used.

Well, not that he's supposed to know... Peter is a linguist interested (I
gather) in the theorical and historical aspects of writing.

It is understandable that he only has a marginal interested in the
*technical* aspects of writing (such as how you encode characters on web
pages, how you build a typewriter, how you cut the tip of a reed pen, how
you impress wedges on a clay tablet...).

Similarly, a linguist whose main interest is spoken language is not supposed
to know how to repair a telephone...

(What shocks me about Peter is rather what he said yesterday about Arabic
with vowel marks being an alphabet! I am still sitting there, astonished,
looking at the smoking ruins of the "ground zero" of my former understanding
of writing system taxonomy... :-)

> I am hoping that Unicode members will be encouraged to say something
> like 'Tamil, and Indic scripts, have an Aksharamala and the aksharas
> will be displayed if you have a USP10.dll version 471.' Now that
> would be useful information.

What does this piece of information have to do with Unicode or "Unicode
members"? That's system information about the version of *Microsoft* Windows
installed on your PC. It's something the Microsoft technical assistance is
supposed to tell you.

_ Marco