Xref: utzoo soc.culture.nordic:1593 comp.std.internat:539
Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcsun!hafro!isgate!krafla!heimir
From: heimir@rhi.hi.is (Heimir Thor Sverrisson)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.nordic,comp.std.internat
Subject: Re: ASCII for national characters
Message-ID: <1353@krafla.rhi.hi.is>
Date: 19 Nov 89 22:57:57 GMT
References: <472@enea.se>
Organization: University of Iceland
Lines: 26

sommar@enea.se (Erland Sommarskog) writes:

... deleted description of the eight bit character set standard, ISO 8859
(especially ISO 8859/1 or Latin-1).

>Then of course there is problem to start posting Usenet articles
>from your VT320 using Latin-1. People with seven-bit terminals,
>of which there probably are a few, will get the new characters
>folded into old making your text quite incomprehensible, even
>worse than those brackets and braces you get using the national
>seven-bit conventions for dotted "a":s and "o":s.

People with seven bit terminals can put filters on their news readers
so they get something meaningful out of the eight bit charaters. They
could for example translate the upper case icelandic thorn into 'Th'
and 'o accute' into 'o'. Then I would be able to use my middle name 
SPELLED CORRECTLY in my signature. I could also send you direct mail 
in Danish and you could answer me in Swedish. 

We have been using the ISO set here in Iceland for some years now and 
I'm very surprised of how far behind the Scandinavian contries are in 
this sense, they all seem to be using (their own special version of) 
seven bit modified ASCII sets.
--
Heimir Thor Sverrisson
heimir@rhi.hi.is