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From: prc@erbe.se (Robert Claeson)
Newsgroups: comp.binaries.ibm.pc.d
Subject: Re: why does ms_sh mask the 8th bit ?
Message-ID: <1387@hulda.erbe.se>
Date: 14 Apr 90 07:55:01 GMT
References: <1613@krafla.rhi.hi.is> <2730001@hpgnd.HP.COM> <1741@cybaswan.UUCP>
Organization: ERBE DATA AB, Jarfalla, Sweden
Lines: 26

In article <1741@cybaswan.UUCP>, iiitsh@cybaswan.UUCP (Steve Hosgood) writes:

> That's nearly correct, but actually what often happens is that UK equipment
> has the so-called 'national characters' rearranged so that the pound-sign
> can be included. This then causes all sorts of irritations, like finding
> your C-programs being displayed with "<poundsign>include XXX" lines which
> look really horrid.

Then, let's add the U.K. to the list of countries that needs 8 bit characters.

> My sympathies are with the Icelanders, Scandinavians, French, Germans etc...
> The *BIG* question is: when is the 8 bit version of NEWS coming out?
> (Complete of course with ability to switch from any ISO LATIN/xxx character
> set to any other in an organised manner - just right for soc.culture.esperanto
> people and zillions of others) 

They already run 8-bit news in Iceland. As I understand it, there is a set
of patches available in Iceland to make B news 2.11 use 8 bit characters.
Rn isn't that easy to patch, though. And the Icelandic patches doesn't
(again, as I understand it) allow for ISO 2022 character set shift sequences
to be used to transparently shift among different character sets. Would
anyone from Iceland be willing to comment on this?

-- 
          Robert Claeson      E-mail: rclaeson@erbe.se
	  ERBE DATA AB