Message-ID: <3AC09DA4.F5842A94@csi.com>
Date: Tue, 27 Mar 2001 09:03:16 -0500
From: John Colagioia <JColagioia@csi.com>
Organization: No Conspiracy Here...
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Subject: Re: [glk] Latin-1 and other languages
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Karl Ove Hufthammer wrote:

> John Colagioia <JColagioia@csi.com> wrote in message
> <3ABF4E13.4CFA6BAB@csi.com>:
> >> The Bitstream Cyberbit is a ~12 MB truetype font freely available, BTW. It
> >> contains most Unicode characters (though it's very ugly! :( ).
> >Plus, a 12MB download to play a game on a system whose games used to be 90kB
> >seems...I don't know...a bit unsettling...
> You only need if it you want (almost) all Unicode characters. Which you
> *don't* need if you play English, French, German, Russian, Turkish &c. games.
> If you're using Windows, you'll probably find most characters you'll need in
> 'Times New Roman', which contains 1296 characters in the Western version (or
> glyphs, really). <URL: http://www.microsoft.com/typography/ >. Or Georgia,
> which is much more nicer looking for screen display.

Well, that's just the thing, you must realize.  Once Unicode support is
available, I give it six months before the first game is released where the
player is on an Egyptian tomb raid, and must translate the hieroglyphics, fly to
his secret criminal contact who is hiding out in Vladivostok (travelling on
Aeroflot--where he must read the in-Russian menu to be able to order lunch...),
then zip back down to Turkey for supplies.

It's one of those tradeoffs of the industry.  The flexibility can't come without
a price.  In this case, it's a download which is about a hundred times larger
than the software that uses it (assuming an exclusively IF world, of course...).

Incidentally, I would be downloading Cyberbit as I type this, if it were still
available as a free download, because I actually do need that sort of capability
from time to time--I just feel that it's an inappropriate thing to require if,
the next time I try to learn Russian, I try to play a Russian game and find out
that the game is a 100kB download, but the support...well, the support system is
quite a bit larger than several of the computers I used to own.

But, again, that might just be me.  Starting one's life on a Commodore 64 with a
tape drive and (eventually) a 110-baud modem can have some warping effects on
one's psyche, I guess...


