But a little picture of a printer works everywhere.
Only if you know what a printer is looks like. And I don't know about
you, but the "little picture of a printer" on, let's say, the Print
button in MS Word, looks absolutely nothing like any of the printers I
have here. Now *I* know that it looks like a big old impact printer,
with output coming from the top, but the vast majority of the general
public these days will never have seen such a beast! [...]
That's true, but then, a simple old dot-matrix makes a more
distinctive pictogram than a laser, which tends to be a simple box.
But so long as people learn to associate the pictogram with its
meaning, it works, and it's international and does not require
literacy.
Quite why I'd want illeterates to be connecting cables to my computer is
totally beyond me...
If you have to learn that $icon means 'connect printer cable here' you
can equally easilly learn that you connect said cable to a connector
labelled wit hte string of chracters 'printer'. Or 'imprimante'. Or
'drucker' or whatver it is in any other langage. Am English-language
manual fro a French device could quite easliy contain the statement
'Connect the parellel printer cable to the 25 pin socket labelled
'imprimante'' . That would be as easy to follow as using the icon, with
the benefit that if the manual got lost, a French-English dictionary
would explain the use of that connector.
-tony