🚀 go-pugleaf

A repost from alt.uu.future,alt.education.distance:

From: gst@spdcc.com (Gary S. Trujillo)
Subject: Re: Usenet University. Learning Material. Accented Characters on PCs.
Message-ID: <1992Jul17.063251.21882@spdcc.com>
Reply-To: gst@gnosys.svle.ma.us (Gary S. Trujillo)
Organization: S.P. Dyer Computer Consulting
References: <1992Jul12.014720.19020@spdcc.com> <2vpmbw3@cck.coventry.ac.uk>
Date: Fri, 17 Jul 1992 06:32:51 GMT

In article <2vpmbw3@cck.coventry.ac.uk> esz001@cck.coventry.ac.uk
	(Will Overington) writes:

> Thank you very much for sending this out.
> 
> I feel that this has started to prove that Usenet University is of
> value.
> 
> I had never heard of the BALT-L mailing list until you mentioned it.


Here's more information on the subject of character-set representations
from the BALT-L list:

Received: by gnosys.svle.ma.us (/\=-/\ Smail3.1.17.5 #17.68)
	id <m0m0GWc-0001CNC@gnosys.svle.ma.us>; Tue, 23 Jun 92 15:27 EDT
Date: Tue, 23 Jun 1992 18:47:21 GMT
Reply-To: Baltic Republics Discussion List <UBVM.cc.buffalo.edu!BALT-L>
From: VAX.ACS.OPEN.AC.UK!AEB_BEVAN

broadcast to list 23 June 1992

Original sender:  peter@citr.uq.oz.au (Peter Klavins)

Just by accident while reading Internet RFC's, I came across a new one,
RFC 1345, Character Mnemonics & Character Sets, K. Simonsen, that deals
with representing all known character set standards as 7-bit character
groupings, usually just pairs of 7-bit characters.  The intent of the
RFC is to standardise the way international languages are represented in
the still mainly 7-bit transmission environment offerred by Internet.
The summary reads as follows:

1.  INTRODUCTION

   With the growing internationalization of the Internet, support for
   many coded character sets is required. It is the intention of this
   memo to document precisely the mapping between all characters and
   their corresponding coded representations in various coded character
   sets, and give names to these coded character sets, so they can be
   referenced unambiguously in Internet standards.

   This memo does not indicate anything about the validity of using
   these specifications in any Internet standard, so you should consult
   each individual Internet standard to see which coded character sets
   and names are allowed there.

   Unambiguous character mnemonics are specified, which provide a
   practical way of identifying a character, without reference to a
   coded character set and its code in this coded character set.  The
   mnemonics are written in a minimal set of characters, namely the
   invariant 83 graphical characters of ISO 646, which is a kind of
   greatest common subset to be found between the majority of coded
   character sets, including ASCII, national variants of the ISO 646 7-
   bit character set and various EBCDICs.  In addition, the numeric
   value of the coded representations of all these characters are the
   same in all coded character sets compatible with ISO standards.  All
   of them except two, EXCLAMATION MARK and QUOTATION MARK, have the
   same coded representation in all variants of EBCDIC.  This minimal
   set of characters is called the reference character set in this memo.

   The mnemonics can be used in Internet standards for easy and
   unambiguous reference, and they can also serve as a fallback
   representation in various Internet specifications.

   The coded character sets covered include all parts of ISO 8859, ISO
   6937-2 and all ISO 646 conforming coded character sets in the ISO
   character set registry managed by ECMA according to ISO 2375.  Almost
   all graphic coded character sets in the ECMA registry (1) are
   covered.  The graphic coded character sets not included are registry
   numbers 31, 38, 39, 53, 59, 68, 71, 72, 129 and 137.  In addition
   many vendor defined character sets are covered, including PC
   codepages (4), (7), (8), many EBCDIC character sets (4), (5), (6) and
   HP, DEC and Apple character sets (8), (9), (10), (13), (14).  The
   East-Asian 16-bit character sets from the ECMA registry is also
   included in this memo.

I propose that we, the BALT-L community, look at standardising on the
representations used in this RFC, since firstly we won't be inventing
our own wheel, secondly we have a chance of being in step with those
organisations that accept this standard, and thirdly, we will have
chosen unique representations for characters in our BALT-L languages
that won't conflict with representations used by other languages, and so
we would be able to write a document that included a BALT-L language
juxtaposed with other languages, with all characters represented in a
unique way.

Some sample representations are:

   The format of the table is:

   1st field is the character mnemonic (mostly 2 characters).
   2nd field is the ISO 2DIS 10646 code in hexadecimal.
   3rd field is the long descriptive name of ISO 2DIS 10646.

 A:     00c4    LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A WITH DIAERESIS
 A-     0100    LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A WITH MACRON
 A;     0104    LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A WITH OGONEK
 C<     010c    LATIN CAPITAL LETTER C WITH CARON
 E-     0112    LATIN CAPITAL LETTER E WITH MACRON
 E.     0116    LATIN CAPITAL LETTER E WITH DOT ABOVE
 E;     0118    LATIN CAPITAL LETTER E WITH OGONEK
 G,     0122    LATIN CAPITAL LETTER G WITH CEDILLA
 I-     012a    LATIN CAPITAL LETTER I WITH MACRON
 K,     0136    LATIN CAPITAL LETTER K WITH CEDILLA
 L,     013b    LATIN CAPITAL LETTER L WITH CEDILLA
 N,     0145    LATIN CAPITAL LETTER N WITH CEDILLA
 O:     00d6    LATIN CAPITAL LETTER O WITH DIAERESIS
 O-     014c    LATIN CAPITAL LETTER O WITH MACRON
 R,     0156    LATIN CAPITAL LETTER R WITH CEDILLA
 S<     0160    LATIN CAPITAL LETTER S WITH CARON
 U:     00dc    LATIN CAPITAL LETTER U WITH DIAERESIS
 U-     016a    LATIN CAPITAL LETTER U WITH MACRON
 U;     0172    LATIN CAPITAL LETTER U WITH OGONEK
 Z<     017d    LATIN CAPITAL LETTER Z WITH CARON

I personally would find it much more awkward to use this representation
than the familiar apostrophe one that I currently use, but if there is
to be some standardisation, I firmly believe that the above is a good
candidate.

As a side issue on RFC's:  they carry a lot of weight in the networking
community, almost on a par with ISO standards, though a lot more
informal, and the standards are usually extremely well researched.  This
particular one goes for 103 pages, and represents a lot of effort.  Let
us not dismiss it lightly.

Pe'teris Kl'avin's' (the old way for now)

 Peter Klavins    Internet: peter@citr.uq.oz.au   Fidonet:    3:640/821
 Centre for Information Technology Research       Phone: +61 7 365 4321
 University of Queensland QLD 4072 Australia      Fax:   +61 7 365 4399

-- 
    Gary S. Trujillo                             gst@gnosys.svle.ma.us
Somerville, Massachusetts               {wjh12,bu.edu,spdcc,ima,cdp}!gnosys!gst