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Tom Petch
----- Original Message -----
From: "Iljitsch van Beijnum" <iljitsch(_at_)muada(_dot_)com>
To: "John C Klensin" <john-ietf(_at_)jck(_dot_)com>
Cc: "IETF-Discussion Discussion" <ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org>
Sent: Tuesday, June 20, 2006 12:18 AM
Subject: Re: Image attachments to ASCII RFCs (was: Re: Last Call:
'ProposedExperiment: Normative Format in Addition to ASCII Text' toExperimental
RFC (draft-ash-alt-formats))
On 19-jun-2006, at 20:09, John C Klensin wrote:
(2) If I prepare an RFC draft using some mechanism which
produces a document in form X, where X might include
<snip>
Two prominent problems associated with the ASCII format are that it
doesn't really support formulas and figures. I was intrigued with the
earlier Unicode examples, so I decided to do some checking of my own
with regard to "unicode art" for figures. Have a look at:
http://www.muada.com/drafts/utf8-art.txt
http://www.muada.com/drafts/utf16-art.txt
I think this is closer to what an RFC with Unicode line art would
look like than trying to present an example in email. For me, the
UTF-8 encoding isn't immediately decoded properly by my browser, but
the UTF-16 version is. I also can't get this displayed properly on
the command line on my Mac. Still, it's not _too_ hard to have the
Unicode characters displayed properly.
I agree in principle that adding a selected subset of Unicode would address the
most pressing issues. But, for whatever reason, I get gibberish on both the
URLs you give. By contrast, the figure embedded in an e-mail earlier displayed
perfectly (until it got mangled when included in a reply). This suggests to me
that the world is not quite ready for Unicode yet (I am using vanilla Windows
software, as most of the world does:-(.
Tom Petch
The Unicode line art looks a
lot better than ASCII-only line art, but it shares many of the same
limitations, such as only (reasonably) being able to display
rectangular shapes and horizontal/vertical lines. There are some
exceptions such as the ability to use rounded corners, but true round
shapes or even usable diagonal lines don't seem to be supported. This
also means that it should be generally possible to convert from
Unicode to ASCII-only line drawings without much loss of information.
There has been some talk about specifying a font for displaying
Unicode, but on my Mac at least, that doesn't seem to be necessary.
An important issue with different fonts is the difference in
character width for different characters, but the line art characters
are mostly the same width so this isn't an issue. However, the width
of the space character can vary, but there's probably a fixed width
space in the table somewhere. Also, it looks like there is only a
single glyph for these types of characters that is shared between
fonts. I.e., whether I use Courier or Times, the line drawing
characters look the same.
It does seem to me that looking into Unicode for better formula and
drawing support makes a lot of sense. This allows us to make better
looking RFCs without radically changing the way RFCs are published.
However, I think we probably want to change the process for other
reasons. I think it would be very useful to have the "source" of an
RFC available with style tagging and so on in order to more easily
derive future work. It's probably also a good idea to have "blessed"
PDFs or some similar format for pretty printing, especially for the
RFCs that contain formulas and drawings. And we may want to make
those formulas and drawings available as simple bitmap images so they
can be easily viewed on systems with limited capabilities. But with
all of that in place, it's probably a good idea to keep having the
ASCII version of RFCs be the normative version.
Anyway, that's my $0.02 Canadian on this subject.
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