🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <728@castor.linkoping.telesoft.se> ath@linkoping.telesoft.se (Anders Thulin) writes:

> It was recently remarked in comp.text that ISO 8859-1 (Latin-1) does
> not cover the major Western languages. As an example, it was noted
> that the French letter <oe> (ligature of o and e) was not included
> in any of the Latin-n tables.

Neither are the ligatures fi, fl, ffi, and ffl.  These are truly
indespensible to typographers.  ISO (DIS) 10646 has these as well as
the oe ligature.

> I am trying to find out the reason for this apparent oversight.

While you're at it, can you try to find out what the hell the
multiplication and division signs are doing in the middle of the
accented characters, too?

> Is <oe> an indispensable character in French? 

The Frenchmen I've talked to recognize it as a ligature, only, unlike,
as I mentioned in comp.text, the Danish, Icelandic and Norwegian
character <ae>.  This is not a typographic convention, it's a special
character.  It's relevant for collation order, and other things.  The
French <oe> is supposed to be collated as the string "oe".

> If anyone out there has any authoritative info about the curious
> letter lower case y with dieresis - what language? why no upper-case
> form in the Latin tables? - I would be very interested.

Sorry, can't help here.  At least not yet, until I find the list of
languages in which it is used.  Maybe later today.

--
What's your favorite amphibian?  French girls.
--
[Erik Naggum]	Snail: Naggum Software / BOX 1570 VIKA / 0118 OSLO / NORWAY
		Mail: <erik@naggum.uu.no>, <enag@ifi.uio.no>
My opinions.	Wail: +47-2-836-863	Another int'l standards dude.