🚀 go-pugleaf

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

From: daveh@teal.csn.org (Dave Hughes)
Subject: Re: TOOLS Roman (including Esperanto) and Cyrillic over the net
Message-ID: <BsBMrL.4IE@csn.org>
Date: 1 Aug 92 20:11:44 GMT
References: <6s4mbkkx@cck.coventry.ac.uk> <1992Jul24.103943.28916@ccsun.strath.ac.uk>
Organization: Colorado SuperNet, Inc.


If everyone will just be a little patient, we are attempting a
*universal* solution to the problem of creating, transmitting,
and viewing other-than-English-ascii languages. Matter of fact
we have retained two software engineers in Moscow to write our
version of the software.

The solution lies in using the NAPLPS (North American Presentation
Level Protocol Syntax) standard, which itself is based, architurally
on the ISO 2022 character set extension standard. 

NAPLPS happens to be used by lots of 'videotex' vendors - such as
IBM-Sears 'Prodigy' service, Canadian 'Alex' service. However
they never saw the market in low end-user Naplps frame 'creation'
software. The end users just have terminal programs with which to
view the 'online graphics.' (The Naplps standard even includes
the mosaic tables which are the basis of Minitel)

A standard Naplps terminal, or frame creation program (and all
such programs out there are not 'standard' - while ours will
rigerously abide by it) contains tables. ASCII, PDI (drawing
elements), MOSAIC, and SUPPLEMENTARY. The supplementary
table, when invoked, carries all the 'extended' 8 bit characters,
which comprise all the accents and special characters that
about 50 European langauges need - based on Latin. Any MSDOS
manual shows those characters. 

Then there is a DRCS table, by which any set of characters (cyrillic)
or symbols (math/science) which do not number over 94 can be
created one-time, used in the Naplps frame creation program to
'type' in cyrillic, or math formulas, and, if the users do not
have the same table, be sent over telecom preceeding the text,
and any standard naplps terminal program will automatically load
the table and display the characters (and graphics if part of
what's sent) properly.

There are even Naplps solutions for Asian ( > 94 characters)
languages.

So we are creating a program which can handle this, completely
standard. Our Russian partners are exited about it, for they
see how elegant a soltion it willmake for their neck of the
woods. They are well into the programs, which we think can be
marketted for $100 or less (program consists of drawing/graphics,
symbol/wordprocessing, terminal functions which, for starters
will run on any MSDOS machine - Hercules mono, cga,vga, ega or
beyond. And then be ported to Macs). 

And we think we have even solved the problem of sending those
extended character set files through any e-mail system without
a problem, again in a very standard way.

Part of our reasons for undertaking this has been the problem,
bot only of foreign language online education, but also 
the teaching of math/science, with their symbols, online in
a general, rather than system specific way. 

So stay tuned - we hope to have the beta versions in a couple
months. And if you are interested in being informed when we
have something to ship, just email me  daveh@csn.org.