Comment by thaumasiotes
4 years ago
> One of the original goals of Unicode was to be able to computerize every document. I still have some old linguistics books in which characters have been handwritten into typed or even typeset text.
That's a weird goal for Unicode to have. We've already accomplished that; a PDF file does the job better (note: PDF documents already support every character existing in the past, present, or future!) while being less complex.
I don’t understand. If there is no computerized way to represent the script, all you can do would be to include photographs in your pdf. The point of computerization is not simply storage and retrieval (and retrieval is hard if you can’t represent the script) but automated processing, which is meaningless if you can’t represent any semantics).
Separately, PDF felt like a step backwards on the day it was announced and sadly nothing since then has changed that.
How do you search for non-unicode characters in a pdf document?
How do you search for them in a book?
ctrl-F once you have digitized it.
6 replies →