Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!thunder.mcrcim.mcgill.edu!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!bloom-beacon!eru!hagbard!sunic!ugle.unit.no!nuug!ifi!gisle From: gisle@ifi.uio.no (Gisle Hannemyr) Newsgroups: comp.text Subject: Re: troff postprocessors for ISO 8859 characters Message-ID: Date: 14 Jan 91 21:33:05 GMT References: <1990Dec28.195703.2749@cbnewsl.att.com> <1038@ecicrl.UUCP> <1991Jan3.151843.24109@cbnewsl.att.com> Sender: gisle@ifi.uio.no (Gisle Hannemyr) Organization: University of Oslo, Norway Lines: 57 Nntp-Posting-Host: kyrre.ifi.uio.no In-Reply-To: npn@cbnewsl.att.com's message of 3 Jan 91 15:18:43 GMT Originator: gisle@kyrre.ifi.uio.no In article <1991Jan3.151843.24109@cbnewsl.att.com> npn@cbnewsl.att.com (nils-peter.nelson) writes: > Chris Lewis requests an additional field in the width > tables to instruct troff how to manufacture the additional > 8859 characters that are not in ASCII. Some of them appear > quite easy (e.g., the Yen sign looks like a Y with a line > through it, or the lower case letters with accent marks) > but others appears near-impossible. For example, all the > upper case letters will obliterate diacriticals, and the > Icelandic eth doesn't appear to have an obvious representation. > Is it worth doing half the job? (I.e., should we try to > implement those characters that can be done this way and > forget the others? Do a bad job on the others?) > My inclination is to support two and only two modes for > "production": PostScript and nroff. If you want ISO 8859 > nroff, get an ISO 8859 terminal. The stuff about 7 bit > shorthand for 8 bit characters was intended for debugging > and interchange, not production. So far, no one has answered > my previous question: will this direction meet the needs > of the European market? First when you say ISO 8859, do you actually mean the complete set of ISO 8859 character sets, or just the ISO 8859/1? In any case, only the latter is yet implemented in most PostScript printers. One important source for information on how the European market views character sets are the European Government OSI Profiles. They are called thinks like GOSIP (UK), SOSIP (Sweden), NOSIP (Norway) and EPHOS == European Procurement Handbook for Open Systems (European Community). The X/Open portability guide NLS also discusses character sets. I have spent some time studying these, and in brief, yes, they focus on ISO 8859/1. And IMHO supporting ISO 8859/1 will meet the major requirements for most of Western Europe, Note, however the following three exceptions: 1) Slavic languages, and of cource cyrillic, as required in Easter Europe is not covered by ISO 8859/1. 2) Lappish -- a small minority language in the north of Finland, Sweden and Norway -- is not covered by ISO 8859/1 (but by ISO 8859/4). 3) A number of network communication protocols (most important X.400 electronic mail) assumes ISO 6937/2, not ISO 8859/1 (ISO 6937/2 is s superset of ISO 8859/1-4). -- Disclaimer: The opinions expressed herein are not necessarily those of my employer, not necessarily mine, and probably not necessary. - gisle hannemyr (Norwegian Computing Center) EAN: C=no;PRMD=uninett;O=nr;S=Hannemyr;G=Gisle (X.400 SA format) gisle.hannemyr@nr.no (RFC-822 format) Inet: gisle@ifi.uio.no UUCP: ...!mcsun!ifi!gisle ------------------------------------------------