Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!samsung!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!ncar!gatech!mcnc!rti!dg-rtp!bigben!bigben!philip From: philip@beeblebrox.dle.dg.com (Philip Gladstone) Newsgroups: comp.protocols.iso Subject: Re: Character sets: ISO 6937 vs ISO 8859 Message-ID: Date: 6 Nov 90 15:32:50 GMT References: <1411.657811134@UK.AC.UCL.CS> Sender: usenet@dle.dg.com (Net News) Organization: Data General, Development Lab Europe Lines: 47 In-Reply-To: S.Kille@CS.UCL.AC.UK's message of 5 Nov 90 13:18:54 GMT Standard character sets are a true minefield. The scoop is (I think as follows): 8859.1 8-bit X-Windows character set 8859.n 8-bit A family of character sets, including greek, cyrillic etc. 6937.n 8-bit (with *some* two byte characters) Overall includes the same set of characters as the entire 8859.n family. 6937.1 & 6937.2 are (roughly) equivalent to T.61 (1984) excluding Kanji. T.61 (84) 8-bit (some two byte character), 16-bit Kanji. This contains all western european characters and the Japanese Kanji set. Note that the Kanji set contains Cyrillic and *some* greek characters (but no terminal sigma for instance). T.61 (88) 8-bit (some two byte characters), 16-bit Kanji, 8-bit Greek This is an enhancement to the 84 version by the addition of an 8-bit greek set. I think that Chinese also got added. JIS C 6226 16-bit This is known as Kanji. JIS X 0208 This is the current name for JIS C 6226. T61String (TeletexString) is subtly incompatible between 1984 and 1988 X.400 (but I have a defect report in about that). Note that in any event, T61String (88) is a SUPERSET of 84 in that greek characters are allowed. Also please note that the curly bracket characters {} *are* in T61String, its is just that they are rather difficult to find being located in the kanji portion. In answer to your question 'What are the respective merits?': As far as I am concerned, each character set for conveying data is sufficiently different, with different escape sequences etc, that you need to have a comprehensive solution to the character set problem. Once you have this, it doesn't matter much which set you use provided you don't start losing characters. -- Philip Gladstone Development Lab Europe Data General, Cambridge England. +44 223-67600