Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!tank!ux1.cso.uiuc.edu!brutus.cs.uiuc.edu!apple!oliveb!pyramid!ctnews!mitisft!flavio From: flavio@mitisft.Convergent.COM (Flavio Rose) Newsgroups: comp.std.misc Subject: Re: French Standard Character Set. Message-ID: <1337@mitisft.Convergent.COM> Date: 20 Dec 89 18:50:19 GMT References: Distribution: comp.std.misc Organization: Convergent Technologies, San Jose, CA Lines: 17 Yoshihisa Takayama asks if there is an international standard for representing French. There is a standard called ISO Latin 1. It has ASCII in positions 32 through 126 and additional characters needed to write the Western European languages in positions 160 through 254. (There are also standards called ISO Latin 2 through 4, if I remember correctly, in which the contents of 160 through 254 are suitable for Eastern European languages.) These standards were approved around 1986, *after* Apple and IBM decided on how they would use positions 160 through 254. There's an American saying, "closing the barn door after the horse has left" or something like that. I do not know about French national standards.