Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!sun-barr!lll-winken!sol.ctr.columbia.edu!emory!gatech!bloom-beacon!eru!hagbard!sunic!chalmers.se!cs.chalmers.se!jeffrey From: jeffrey@cs.chalmers.se (Alan Jeffrey) Newsgroups: comp.text Subject: Re: Polyglot List Issue (Really: Does Latin-1 cover Western Europe ?) Message-ID: <4364@undis.cs.chalmers.se> Date: 4 Feb 91 21:44:49 GMT References: <1840@seti.inria.fr> <722@castor.linkoping.telesoft.se> <1991Jan29.200653.23928@sq.sq.com> <723@castor.linkoping.telesoft.se> <4363@undis.cs.chalmers.se> Organization: Dept. of CS, Chalmers, Sweden Lines: 25 In article enag@ifi.uio.no (Erik Naggum) writes: >Let me take issue with the bizarre idea that ISO 8859-1 should be >sufficient for typesetting. This wasn't what I was arguing---certainly Latin1 shouldn't cover ligatures, font changes, etc. which are too dependent on typographical decisions, but it *should* be capable of encoding plain text. Tables, mathematics, fonts, blah etc. need special encoding, but any serious character encoding scheme should be able to handle, say, a dictionary (minus the pronounciation guide). In an idealish world, Latin1 would cover the plain text characters from the Western European languages, plus the standard typewriter/programming symbols. Unfortunately there's more than 191 of these, so something's got to give, and it's probably the claim that Latin1 covers all Western Europe. Unfortunately, whichever standard covers the US will probably end up becoming the de facto standard for international transmission, so we'll end up no better off than today. Sighh... Alan. -- Alan Jeffrey Tel: +46 31 72 10 98 jeffrey@cs.chalmers.se Department of Computer Sciences, Chalmers University, Gothenburg, Sweden