🚀 go-pugleaf

Sandra Martin writes that there already exist defined keystroke sequences "that
allow users to create any Latin-2 character with an ASCII-only keyboard."  I'd
love to hear the details -- can anyone tell me what these are?  Where do such
keystroke conventions come from?

Latin-2 characters are intended to handle Albanian, Czech, German, Hungarian,
Polish, Rumanian, Serbocroatian (the Latin-alphabet form, of course), Slovak,
and Slovene.  So basically East Europe.

I don't have a machine-readable listing of the 96 upper-half characters, so I'm
reluctant to do all that typing from the ISO document!

Bruce Sherwood
bas@andrew.cmu.edu  or  bas@andrew.bitnet

>Sandra Martin writes that there already exist defined keystroke
>sequences "that allow users to create any Latin-2 character with
>an ASCII-only keyboard."

No, she doesn't.  What she writes is

        I know that such sequences exist for Latin-1, but
        I don't know whether anyone has defined them for
        Latin-2.

The sequences exist for Latin-1, but they may or may not exist for
Latin-2.

>I'd love to hear the details -- can anyone tell me what these are?

The way these "compose sequences" work - at least on the systems with
which I'm familar - is that there is some key that introduces the
compose sequence.  You type that key (e.g., on the Sun Type 4 keyboard
it's labelled "compose", on the DEC keyboards it's labelled "Compose
Character") and then you type two (or possibly more) keys.

Some level of {hard|firm|soft}ware recognizes this sequence and
generates an ISO Latin #1, #2, etc. code from them.

A couple of examples from the SunOS keyboard driver (at least on the
'386i; support for Sun-3 and Sun-4 will come in a later release):

	<Compose> r o -> "registered trademark character"
	<Compose> a " -> "a with an umlaut"

>Where do such keystroke conventions come from?

I don't know.  Is there a standard (*de jure* or *de facto*) for them?

>Latin-2 characters are intended to handle Albanian, Czech, German, Hungarian,
>Polish, Rumanian, Serbocroatian (the Latin-alphabet form, of course), Slovak,
>and Slovene.  So basically East Europe.

For what languages are Latin-3 and Latin-4 intended?

>I don't have a machine-readable listing of the 96 upper-half
>characters, so I'm reluctant to do all that typing from the ISO document!

Besides, many systems don't have a way of displaying text in Latin-2, so
there's no guarantee that a machine-readable listing would work on her
machine anyway....  She might want to post a paper-mail address so that
printed copies can be sent.

In article <918@auspex.UUCP> guy@auspex.UUCP (Guy Harris) writes:
 > For what languages are Latin-3 and Latin-4 intended?
 > 
Latin-3: South Eastern Europe
Latin-4: Northern Europe
As far as I know they are still draft.
-- 
dik t. winter, cwi, amsterdam, nederland
INTERNET   : dik@cwi.nl
BITNET/EARN: dik@mcvax

I'm only too well aware that the Latin-3 character shapes aren't going to show
up in a mail message on most computers!  But there are listings in the ISO
documents of the names of the characters.  E.g., "small letter s with cedilla."
Here is the full listing of languages given in the ISO documents.

Latin-1:  Danish, Dutch, English, Faeroese, Finnish, French, German, Icelandic,
Irish, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish.  Note that while
Latin-1 is sometimes referred to as handling West European languages, it doesn't
handle Catalan (see Latin-3) or Welsh (as I understand it, not handled by any
ISO-8859 set), and maybe other non-national but existing languages of West
Europe.

Latin-2:  Albanian, Czech, English, German, Hungarian, Polish, Rumanian,
Serbocroatian, Slovak, Slovene.

Latin-3:  Afrikaans, Catalan, Dutch, English, Esperanto, German, Italian,
Maltese, Spanish, Turkish.  Note that Dutch, German, Italian, and Spanish are
also covered by Latin-1.

Latin-4:  Danish, Estonian, English, Finnish, German, Greenlandic, Lappish,
Latvian, Lithuanian, Swedish, Norwegian.  Again, note the many overlaps with
Latin-1.

5) Cyrillic.

6) Arabic.

7) Greek.

8) Hebrew.

Bruce Sherwood
bas@andrew.cmu.edu  or  bas@andrew.bitnet

dik@cwi.nl (Dik T. Winter) writes:

)In article <918@auspex.UUCP> guy@auspex.UUCP (Guy Harris) writes:
) > For what languages are Latin-3 and Latin-4 intended?
) > 
)Latin-3: South Eastern Europe
)Latin-4: Northern Europe
)As far as I know they are still draft.

No. They are fully approved standards as of April 1988.
-- 
Claus Tondering
Dansk Data Elektronik A/S, Herlev, Denmark
E-mail: ct@dde.dk    or    ...!uunet!mcvax!dkuug!dde!ct

>>Latin-3: South Eastern Europe
>>Latin-4: Northern Europe
>[These] are fully approved standards as of April 1988.

I've seen the Latin-1 and Latin-2 lists, but could somebody post the list of
characters for Latin-3?  I'm particularly interested in knowing the character
values for the Esperanto letters {c,g,h,j,s}-circumflex and u-breve.

Karl W. Z. Heuer (ima!haddock!karl or karl@haddock.isc.com), The Walking Lint