Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!samsung!aplcen!haven!decuac!shlump.nac.dec.com!mountn.dec.com!minow
From: minow@mountn.dec.com (Martin Minow)
Newsgroups: comp.std.internat
Subject: Re: ASCII for national characters
Message-ID: <1083@mountn.dec.com>
Date: 21 Nov 89 16:41:14 GMT
References: <472@enea.se> <2942@psivax.UUCP>
Reply-To: minow@mountn.dec.com (Martin Minow)
Organization: Digital Equipment Corporation
Lines: 17

In article <2942@psivax.UUCP> torkil@psivax.UUCP (Torkil Hammer) states
that slashed-O was omitted from ISO 8859-1.  Actually, upper- and
lower-case variants are in Latin-1 at hex D8 and F8 respectively
(assuming Latin-1 is in the "right half" of the code space).

However, late in the development of Latin-1, the OE and oe ligature
characters were removed, and were replaced by the "multiply" and
"division" signs.  (I will not defend this decision.)

Another missing character is the Dutch ij ligature, which is imperfectly
represented by y-dieresis.  Otherwise, it seems to me that most Western
European languages are well-supported by Latin-1.  Exceptions include
Turkish and the Slavic languages written in Roman letters.

Martin Minow
minow@thundr.enet.dec.com
The above does not represent the position of Digital Equipment Corporation