We're currently upgrading from v3 to v4 of a well-known application for authoring, scheduling, delivering and reporting online assessments, namely Perception.
- v4 supports Unicode.
- Yay! :-)
- v4 has 2 licenses, one supporting less than one-tenth of one percent of the Unicode gamut, and the other supporting all of it.
- Boo! :-(
This seems a little strange because if you support ASCII and your browser supports Unicode then you can do Unicode for free with ASCII by using HTML entities!
OK, you might think: I'll just use ASCII and HTML entities and at least I can see what the additional expense gets me -- built-in Unicode, so I'm happy to struggle along with entities until such time as it becomes worth the expense. (So for instance, I wanted an em-dash "—", which is — in any modern browser.)
Enter the ripoff: Their software's editor permits you to enter HTML entities directly (yay!) but as soon as you exit "raw HTML mode" it parses them into Unicode characters (vaguely sensible if you support Unicode, I suppose.) However the kicker is that you cannot then publish an assessment item containing the character that started life as an ASCII-encoded HTML entity unless you buy the expensive Unicode-complete license! ARGH! ... and my bet is that the difference in cost between licenses is not trivial :-(
(Disclaimer: This is just my opinion, does not reflect the opinion of my employer and could easily have been written by terrifying space monkeys ... YMMV!)
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