Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!samsung!usc!wuarchive!decwrl!shlump.nac.dec.com!mountn.dec.com!minow From: minow@mountn.dec.com (Martin Minow) Newsgroups: comp.std.misc Subject: Re: French Standard Character Set. Message-ID: <1175@mountn.dec.com> Date: 20 Dec 89 14:11:46 GMT References: Reply-To: minow@mountn.dec.com (Martin Minow) Distribution: comp.std.misc Organization: Digital Equipment Corporation Lines: 25 In article takayama@vcom.sony.co.jp (Yoshihisa Takayama) discovered that the French national letters in the standard Apple Macintosh character set do not have the same internal coding as those characters on an IBM-PC, and asks which machine uses an International Standard. Unfortunately, neither directly support the ISO Latin-1 alphabet which is the closest we have to an internationally recognized character set for French. To move text between those computers, you will have to apply some sort of translation algorithm. Since character sets are user-definable on the Macintosh, you could -- with a fair amount of work -- define a keyboard mapping and display font that implement the IBM PC character set on the Mac. I suspect that that would be more trouble than it's worth, however. Perhaps the best solution would be to write "import-export" routines for both systems and use ISO Latin-1 as a common exchange format. Martin Minow minow@thundr.enet.dec.com Ps: there are two 7-bit (ISO 646) character sets for French: one for France and one for Canada. I would strongly recommend using ISO Latin-1 for all new work, however.