selam yonas, yTna,

  Good to have a new foray into the fray today.  Below is my feed back on
the 3 letters of yonas.  Also you will find by item 2 that I may be the
trouble maker for this group >:-)

  Dr. Lloyd Anderson's report is now "online" as a series of scanned gifs.
It is not truly a paper but does outline the issues in his proposal.  You
will find it under a new section called "Papers and Reports".  Look
carefully at address 114C.  What is that char?  I remember seeing it but
probably thought it was just a version of (;) -is it?

  The diskette Abass would send me has yet to arrive, I am hopeful of it
coming this week.  There is never the less pleanty to go over until then...

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> well, it only seems logical to group all similar types of characters.  i
> dont see why you would want any other order.

Yes it seems very logical -so why isn't this naturaly sensibility found in
ASCII?  I assume for some historical reasons of its development.

But yonE, you've missed half of the question.  You agree that they should
be grouped (Q-1/2)  But in what order should the groups follow (Q-2/2)?
The ordering I put in my last mail on the subject matched the ASCII sequence
and (for punctuation) the August '93 CSES proposal.

YTna and Yonas, please give in your next mails complete answers to this issue
so we may close it and move on.  The follow up will be what to include in
each group once we agree on their sequence -there ARE a few sticklers awaiting
here...


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> - take out the 1st section that addresses issues raised by becker.
> - take out any comments relating to any other proposal

I believe from phone conversations I have had with both of you two at 
different times, you two strongly agree on this issue.  Which is good.


So, we have a good "To Do" list then.  So lets move on to a "Who Do" list.
If I may be so bold to suggest a breakdown....

Me:  1) When the LaTeX documents arrive I will get them into a working shape
        for Unix machines.  This will involve extracting some amount of 
        EthioLaTeX commands.

     2) Friday night of this week I will (fingers crossed) write a filter
        that generates Appendix A.  Allowing for easy updates of the
        character addresses in the document as we try different matrix
        arrangements. 

Yonas: 1) Run the ethiom14d300.bdf font through a filter to make it fixed
          width.  For a later use in composing our fidel tables.

       2) Write a rough draft of the introduction you have in mind.  Even
          if it will be 1000% different later, we need that initial
          starting point.


>   - a brief intro about the script

YTna  1) Can you handle the above?  Do you think it is necessary?  
         I have some history available at the fidel page of the ACG
         if it helps (I have been waiting for someone to challenge it :) 

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Perhaps the intro that yTna might write can touch on the need for one address
per char -?  vs a basic 33 plus 7 - 15 diacritics.

We al have some gut feeling as to why the anderson proposal offers hardship
for developers.  I believe Abass worked on specifics at one time.  Maybe we
should take notes on specifics to have arguments ready IF we need them.
But I think we should not focus now on why a system is bad, I agree again
it should not be apart of a the new proposal, we should keep our thoughts
now on making a system that is as strong as can be and be careful to note
the strong points as progress.


Ok, I look forward to hearing from you guys.

 'nite from vt!

    -dan'El