Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!unixhub!shelby!agate!ucbvax!UVCW.UVIC.CA!eskovgaa
From: eskovgaa@UVCW.UVIC.CA (Erik Skovgaard)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.iso
Subject: Character sets: ISO 6937 vs ISO 8859
Message-ID: <183*eskovgaa@uvcw.UVic.ca>
Date: 5 Nov 90 18:11:00 GMT
References: <1411.657811134@UK.AC.UCL.CS>
Sender: usenet@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 16

ISO 6937 was originally in the first draft MOTIS document.  CEN/CENELEC
and NIST chose to include this character set together with a "default
rendition method".  The latter maps non-ASCII characters to ASCII codes
so they can be displayed on an ASCII terminal, arbeit with loss of
information.

ISO 6937 has several options, but basically extends the IA5 by prefixing
some characters with an escape code.  ISO 8859 extends IA5 by using the
eighth bit and thus, less characters are possible than ISO 6937.

In fact, we had a lot of arguments in NIST over which codes we should
include as body parts.  One of the arguments used was that FTAM
supports ISO 8859, but as I recall, we settled on ISO 6937 since this
was decided by CEN/CENELEC in their X.400 profile.

                                            ....Erik.