Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!uwm.edu!rpi!uupsi!sunic!liuida!isy!lysator.liu.se!aronsson From: aronsson@lysator.liu.se (Lars Aronsson) Newsgroups: comp.std.misc Subject: Re: Int'l Character set Message-ID: <71@lysator.liu.se> Date: 12 Jun 90 13:28:01 GMT References: <150@rossignol.Princeton.EDU> <1990May30.045903.14249@agate.berkeley.edu> <3410@auspex.auspex.com> <1990Jun1.010720.16597@agate.berkeley.edu> <1990Jun5.102128.6577@tsa.co.uk> <1647@mountn.dec.com> Sender: news@isy.liu.se (Lord of the News) Organization: Lysator Computer Club, Linkoping University, Sweden Lines: 42 minow@mountn.dec.com (Martin Minow) writes: >While the Macintosh is evolving towards a multi-lingual environment, they >do not seem to be approaching the problem from in the same way as the >ISO Standard body which, in the long term, may be a problem for all of us. ^^^^^ Of course, the word "which" in the above quote alludes to the fact that Mac (Apple Inc.) do not follow ISO. On the other hand, the (mis-) interpretation that "which" alludes to the ISO standard body, gives the quote an entirely different meaning. I live in Sweden, where the national alphabet contains A-Z plus three "umlaut" letters. The Swedish version of the old 7-bit ISO-646 (called Swedish ASCII) has replaced the "[", "\", and "]" characters in ASCII for the national letters, as has many versions of ISO-646 in other European countries. I think the audience can imagine how Pascal and C program listings look when the printer uses Swedish ASCII. Most terminals made here have a SET-UP switch for selecting Swedish or US ASCII. When ISO published the 8859 standard in 1989 (or 1988?), many of us thought this problem was solved once and for all. At Linkoping University, SunOS 4.1 will soon be installed having 8 bit characters and using ISO 8859. Northern Europe will use ISO 8859-1. Unfortunately, the world is no more the same. The Berlin Wall has fallen and the Soviet Empire is tumbling. You cannot imagine how many accent marks these Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Poles, Czechs, Slovacs, and Hungarians can invent! Not thinking about the Cyrillic alphabet. And in 1992, the European Common Market will be a fact and we will need to communicate with people in Portugal, Spain, Italy and Greece. Now, if we are lucky, all these letters are in ISO 8859-1 thru -9 (are there nine?). But it seems we are stuck with this switching between character sets that we know so well from the 7-bit era. Does the ISO 8859 have codes that tell the equipment to set the right version or will we still do this by hand? Or should I learn postscript? Lars Aronsson Aronsson@Lysator.LiU.SE