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In article <TAKAYAMA.89Dec20102525@vcomsa.vcom.sony.co.jp>
takayama@vcom.sony.co.jp (Yoshihisa Takayama) discovered that the
French national letters in the standard Apple Macintosh character set
do not have the same internal coding as those characters on an IBM-PC,
and asks which machine uses an International Standard.

Unfortunately, neither directly support the ISO Latin-1 alphabet which
is the closest we have to an internationally recognized character set
for French.  To move text between those computers, you will have to
apply some sort of translation algorithm.

Since character sets are user-definable on the Macintosh, you could --
with a fair amount of work -- define a keyboard mapping and display
font that implement the IBM PC character set on the Mac.  I suspect that
that would be more trouble than it's worth, however.

Perhaps the best solution would be to write "import-export" routines
for both systems and use ISO Latin-1 as a common exchange format.

Martin Minow
minow@thundr.enet.dec.com

Ps: there are two 7-bit (ISO 646) character sets for French: one for France
and one for Canada.  I would strongly recommend using ISO Latin-1 for
all new work, however.

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. 

takayama@vcom.sony.co.jp (Yoshihisa Takayama) writes:

>I wrote down my article in French language on Apple Macintosh personal
>computer.  There  problem  is occured  when I moved to IBM-PC  with my
>article. Some characters does not appeared normally.   ^a,^i,^u,^e,^o,
>'a,'i,'u,'e,'o  for  instance.  Which  machine  use  IS (International
>Standart). And does French people have some kind of standard? 
>Please forgive my ignorance. Give me more information!

First of all, there are *several* "international standards. Second, these
standards disagree. Third *NO* personal computer that I am aware of uses
any of them. Anything other that 7-bit ASCII is *totally* machine-dependent.

Sorry, but you are stuck unless you use a wordprocessor that is available on
both machines *and* has compatible file formats on both. 
-- 
Leonard Erickson		...!tektronix!reed!percival!bucket!leonard
CIS: [70465,203]
"I'm all in favor of keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of fools.
Let's start with typewriters." -- Solomon Short

takayama@vcom.sony.co.jp (Yoshihisa Takayama) writes:
>I wrote down my article in French language on Apple Macintosh personal
>computer.  There  problem  is occured  when I moved to IBM-PC  with my
>article. Some characters does not appeared normally.   ^a,^i,^u,^e,^o,
>'a,'i,'u,'e,'o  for  instance.  Which  machine  use  IS (International
>Standart). And does French people have some kind of standard? 
>Please forgive my ignorance. Give me more information!

Your Apple System Software release disks should contain a program called
"Apple File Exchange" This program can convert from Apple's character set
to the character set on an IBM PC. If you are using a Mac IIcx, MacIIci, 
SE 30, or one of the new SEs, Apple File Exchange can directly write PC
compatible 3.5" disks.  You would do best converting your word processor
document to a text file, then running the text file through the converter,
though the converter probably supports some word processor document
formats.

Apple, with its Script Manager, is trying hard to support all the world's
scripts in your computer all at once. Other brands merely try to handle
one or two languages at a time. As usual, Apple's products are ahead of
the standards that the other brands are still trying to agree on, and are
not yet in compliance with.

For example, if you install the Kanji system, the Arabic system, and the
Hebrew system all at once, you should be able to get all three langauges,
plus English, French & German, on the same line all at once, using the ROM
text editor, TextEdit. The keyboard should remap as you change language
families, and you should be able to print.

I have these systems on the Developer Tools CDROM apple sent me, but since
my CD ROM drive hasn't arrived, I haven't yet given the above experiment a
try.

--- David Phillip Oster            --  No, I come from Boston. I just work
Arpa: oster@dewey.soe.berkeley.edu --  in cyberspace.
Uucp: {uwvax,decvax}!ucbvax!oster%dewey.soe.berkeley.edu