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Comment by arpa | Hacker News Reader

To be honest, I can't help but think that we're overcomplicating things for ourselves. I mean: think about a typewriter, hell, even typesetting. And now let's consider modern text editing. It's crazy! And yet, the only thing I need is something even simpler than vi: ability to move between the lines when doing cat - > file.

That being said, i do appreciate the effort the good people of text editing make.

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> I mean: think about a typewriter, hell, even typesetting.

Do you know that a Hangul typewriter (for Korean) was a thing back in the 20th century?

as was a Thai typewriter, Cyrillic typewriter, Arabic typewriter, hell, even Chinese and Japanese [0] typewriters

[0] https://learning.knoji.com/short-history-of-the-japanese-typ...

I specifically mentioned Korean typewriters because they had an ingenious design to implement Hangul's combinatoric system---they put the final jamo back to the caret without advancing. It even works flawlessly in the modern computer typography, provided that you type a correct key for each jamo. To my knowledge widespread Arabic and Japanese typewriters were limited (Arabic generally had only initial and isolated forms [1], and Japanese was generally Katakana only---a full Kanji typewriter was more like a mini typesetter).

Even back in the typewriter era, it was not simple. Everytime I see people screaming that Unicode and internationalization is overcomplicated, I like to challenge them with counterexamples.

[1] https://www.quora.com/How-did-typewriters-work-for-Arabic-sc...

Right, but you probably mostly deal with a documents written in a language with a Latin script. Those who don't or can't do this need better.

> Right, but you probably mostly deal with a documents written in a language with a Latin script. Those who don't or can't do this need better.

So, I absolutely love different scripts, and I think it's awesome how many different ways to write mankind has invented over the centuries.

But if Latin-style scripts are so much easier to input into computers, and if computers are not just the wave of the future but the present as well, maybe it would make sense for more languages to adopt Latin-style scripts. After all, we stopped using fractions everywhere in favour of decimals, because decimals are in many cases (not all!) better. Ditto our switch from Roman to Arabic numerals.

> But if Latin-style scripts are so much easier to input into computers, and if computers are not just the wave of the future but the present as well

But the hard part isn't supporting _a_ script, it's supporting _all_ scripts (or at least, all relevant scripts, in our modern interconnected age). It's only moderately more complicated, even with existing latin-centric tools, to only support a single script. Heck, If you only support Chinese + Japanese for example: you can always assume monospacing, which makes layout a breeze; line-wrapping rules are extremely simple [0]; and word-breaking (and associated headaches, like hyphenation and inter-word spacing) is practically a non-factor.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_breaking_rules_in_East_As...

"Just drop your language's writing system in favor of the latin alphabet!"

"It's a hard problem (and doesn't affect me) so let's ignore it altogether!"

Must be easy to make remarks like this when your native language happens to use the latin alphabet...

How about we use our knowledge to build computer systems that respect different writing systems, even if it's hard, instead of enforcing a latin hegemony upon the rest of the world.

Comparing scripts to numeral notation is comparing apples to oranges. The latin syllabary does not work for languages that have more sounds than are represented by 26 characters!

Try that again, but try the suggestion of not using latin characters any longer in favour of, say, the highly logical Korean Hangul writing system.

Still as keen on the idea?

Actually, I almost added, 'why not switch to something like a universal Hangul while we're at it?'

By moving from a non-Latin script to a Latin script, you destroy puns, and I feel that destroys the culture, too. It is too big a price to pay.

What fits all, fits none. Do one thing and do it well. Meaning: those who need it, need something else.

Also, original point about typesetting stands, even in Thai case.

Also i find it ironic that we care a lot about let's say caret movement, when whole classes of devices are unavailable for the blind.

I agree with the ironic sentiment. We've pushed up the complexity of a lot of features because we can, not because the value is there. Unicode itself is a great example of such: it's a dumping ground for "everything that resembles text" - and while it's easy to consume and there is some benefit to be had, it's also hard to comprehend on any level beyond the very basics. It's quite a ways away from the early telegraphy encoding systems.

With respect to selection, selection is key to all forms of interactive editing because without it you don't have interactivity, you have a linear workflow. As such it does deserve some respect as a fundamental feature, even if it's not critical to fix every last bug. Even if you are working via screen reading and voice to text, you can still benefit from having selection tools available to you.

It depends a lot on your goal.

If your goal is, for example, to edit a book, you often need much more than a typewriter can give you. You need figures, equations, centralized text, footnotes, rich text styles, tables.

If your goal is even more ambitious, say, publishing the same book online, such that others can use the contents of the book and select it, look it up, share it, edit it etc., you need many of the above to be understood by the text engine, so you end up with shaping, support for all human scripts with all their accumulated idiosyncrasies etc.

Without any of this, you can barely have an academic life for example on the internet,or engineering disciplines and so on.

I was under impression that academia in engineering fields use LaTex, which is more of a markup language, not features of a rich text editor?

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