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From: minow@mountn.dec.com (Martin Minow)
Newsgroups: alt.bbs,comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: Int'l Chars in Term Emul (was Re: Red Ryder)
Keywords: Internationalization
Message-ID: <933@mountn.dec.com>
Date: 10 Oct 89 14:53:19 GMT
References: <4511@wpi.wpi.edu> <35283@apple.Apple.COM> <4360@mentor.cc.purdue.edu> <1884@draken.nada.kth.se> <14008@well.UUCP>
Reply-To: minow@thundr.enet.dec.com (Martin Minow)
Followup-To: alt.bbs
Organization: Digital Equipment Corporation
Lines: 27

In article <14008@well.UUCP> svc@well.UUCP (Leonard Rosenthol) writes:
>	Wow!  Someone else in the world who understands the needs of the 
>international user (and it not just because he's from Sweden :-).

Well, I used to be from Sweden, and my terminal emulator supports
Latin-1, Latin-8 (Hebrew) and whatever else I need in my own work.
[It's not publically available.]

> This
>means that any roman based langauge can/is supported but languages such as 
>Kanji or Hebrew is not. If you would like to know why supporting those is NOT
>trivial, feel free to ask!)

Hebrew (ISO Latin-8 + Dec VT... Hebrew escape sequences) is fairly simple
to support (adding it to my terminal emulator took about 2 evenings).  Compared
to supporting mouse selection, it was quite trivial.

The problems I see in supporting International Character Sets aren't with
the user-interface (and scripts) but with the Macintosh native character
set itself.  There is no reasonable way to map between the Macintosh
character set and the existing international standards (ISO 8859 Latin-x).
This problem will only get worse over the next several years as ISO 10646
takes shape, and Apple's recently described extensions haven't helped
matters any.

Martin Minow
minow@thundr.enet.dec.com