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   Aaron Rainbolt (arraybolt3@theres.life)'s status on Thursday, 01-Feb-2024 15:45:09 JST Aaron Rainbolt

   Text is one of the most fundamental things people work with when using a computer. Yet there's a lot more to text than meets the eye - text encodings, codepages, scancodes, font hinting and kerning, complex script handling, endianness, OS-dependent line endings, extended ASCII for drawing "pictures" in text, control "characters", etc., etc. I'd have to learn a fair bit in order to make a good article on it, but should I try and write an article on what a computer's idea of "text" is and the history behind it?

   #text #computers #linux #windows #macos #classicmac #retrocomputing #msdos #unicode #fonts #hardware

   • Embed this notice
     Ethan Black (golemwire@social.librem.one)'s status on Thursday, 01-Feb-2024 15:45:08 JST Ethan Black

     in reply to

     @arraybolt3 There's an 'What every programmer absolutely positively needs to know about Unicode' article or something that's useful.
     Found it: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2003/10/08/the-absolute-minimum-every-software-developer-absolutely-positively-must-know-about-unicode-and-character-sets-no-excuses/

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     Ethan Black (golemwire@social.librem.one)'s status on Thursday, 01-Feb-2024 16:32:44 JST Ethan Black

     in reply to

     @arraybolt3 A deeper dive on the history of text would be interesting!