Why Unicode is Better (Even if you’re not a programmer)
Katy Pearce mailed to tell me that Unicode hasn’t really caught on yet in Armenia:
…no one in Armenia likes Unicode because they are all used to using NLS Armenian – the government sponsored system. As long as everyone uses that, they can communicate with one another. … Do you know of any sites that have a simple explanation why Unicode is better?
Yeah, this website! ☺
It’s funny, I’ve seen a lot of tutorials and so on about Unicode, but most of them are written with the programmer in mind—they start off with discussion of bytes and stuff like that.
For non-programmers, there is really only one key point to keep in mind about Unicode, and this is it:
☞ You can put as many languages as you want into a single file.
That’s a page from Wikipedia with English, Armenian, and Russian spellings in a single file, in this case a web page.
That file pretty much couldn’t exist without Unicode. No Unicode, no Wikipedia.
That’s the main reason why Unicode is better, and why it’s worth the effort of standardizing on it.
Now, back to the specific example of Armenia, let’s consider an all-too-real scenario where Unicode could make a difference.
Imagine a state health worker checking her email in Yerevan. A Russian-speaking doctor in a clinic in Azerbaijian has mailed. The health worker doesn’t happen to know much Russian, but she knows enough to recognize the phrase “bird flu,” and immediately forwards it to someone who can translate it into Armenian. Then the report can be forwarded wherever it needs to be.
I just made that scenario up, but look at all the scripts in varying degrees of use around the Caucasus:
Any combination of those languages could end up needing to be translated for some urgent reason or another. And in such a situation you want to be able to think of text as text, not as data.
That’s what Unicode does. It puts everyone on the same page (or screen), quite literally.
NLS Armenian and all the other legacy encodings will eventually go the way of the woolly mammoth. And the sooner the better.
7 comments.
Technorati tags: armenian, encodings, Language and the Web, translation, unicode, Հայերեն
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It’s not so much that Unicode hasn’t caught on, so much as the lack of widespread Windows XP, and other software impediments. Aside from the whole conversion of documents, getting people on the new system, etc, unless you have XP it is hard to type in Unicode, and if people have very old versions of windows and very old computers (as is often the case in Armenia), they just won’t be able to read what you produce.
A few sites like mine and ArmenianHouse.org have already adopted unicode widely for its universality and mutliple languages on one page. Plus, it’s clear that in the future, everything will have to be converted to Unicode anyway, so better sooner rather than later.
So it is happening, gamats gamats…
Hi Raffi! I’ve looked around http://www.armeniapedia.org quite a bit, you’ve got a really nice site going there. (I might have to try some of these ☺).
When you say old computers, how old are you talking? Like, Windows 95 sort of thing? If so, I wonder if an input tool like this one might work to help people input Armenian text through a browser… I don’t know if Win95 supports Unicode at all…
Anyways, thanks for stopping by.
Hi, nice post. I also agree that Unicode is better than ASCII. But I remember few months ago there was an argument in Armenia about adopting the Unicode standard. And I think they had some issues with it.
You should also check out Armenian Unicode website.
Hi Հակոբ!
(By the way, if any readers don’t have an Armenian font, you can use this site to get a transliteration of Armenian Unicode - Հակոբ Գեւորգյան is rendered as Hakob Gèuorgyan, which is at least vaguely close to the way Hakob spells it himself: Hakob Gevorgian.)
Do you have any links on that argument? I’d be interested in knowing more about how the discussion went.
Hi Pat,
I have used to have the file of that discussion, but apparently I have lost it. I will try to find it.
Hi all. I want to represent a new converter.
Armenian Smart Converter is unique software in its kind which allows converting MS Word documents into new international UNICODE standard by precisely keeping the format and design of the original file. You can convert not only MS Word documents but also other text files such as html, txt and etc. Moreover, the software is able to convert documents that contain both Armenian standards (ANSI and UNICODE), as well as documents with English and Armenian texts. http://www.unicode.am/.