Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!mcvax!inria!mirsa!huitema
From: huitema@mirsa.inria.fr (Christian Huitema)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.misc
Subject: Re: 8-bit mail
Message-ID: <190@mirsa.inria.fr>
Date: 19 Jun 89 13:37:20 GMT
References: <733@maxim.erbe.se>
Organization: INRIA, Sophia Antipolis. France
Lines: 28

From article <733@maxim.erbe.se>, by prc@erbe.se (Robert Claeson):
> In article <RECERIK.89Jun14110610@alliant.uni-c.dk> recerik@alliant.uni-c.dk (Erik Bertelsen) writes:
< 
>>X.400 in the 1984 version supports teletex and the IA5 (ASCII) character
<<encodings. The 1988 version adds some more options, but not 8-bit encodings
>>like ISO 8859/1. To my best knowledge X.400 in its current status will not
<<help us poor souls in countries with alphabets with more letters than the
>>26 letters used in English. - sigh!
< 
> Really? I thought that x.400 did use the iso 6937 8-bit character set (which
< is a "true" superset of iso 8859 according to the copy of the standard doc
> that I have and thus can be mapped into ascii, the various iso 646 charsets,
< the various iso 8859 character sets and I guess a number of related sets as
> well).

ISO 6937 is certainly not supported in X.400-1984. But nothing forbids you
to write a translator between this alphabet and the TELETEX alphabet T.61,
which is almost a superset of ASCII, and can express all the various form of
accentuated letters in 6937 -- plus some more, just to please the Malteses
and the Romanians..

T.61 is ``almost'' a superset for the status of the nationally definable
code positions of IA5 is very unclear. It seems to be forbidden to use them
in the plain CCITT T.61, which forbids the encoding of e.g. braces. There is
an ISO equivalent of T.61, where these characters are defined -- and shall
map to the ``international IA5'', i.e. American...

Christian Huitema