🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <ENAG.91Feb4020953@holmenkollen.ifi.uio.no> enag@ifi.uio.no (Erik Naggum) writes:

>Let me take issue with the bizarre idea that ISO 8859-1 should be
>sufficient for typesetting.  

This wasn't what I was arguing---certainly Latin1 shouldn't cover
ligatures, font changes, etc. which are too dependent on typographical
decisions, but it *should* be capable of encoding plain text.  Tables,
mathematics, fonts, blah etc. need special encoding, but any serious
character encoding scheme should be able to handle, say, a dictionary
(minus the pronounciation guide).

In an idealish world, Latin1 would cover the plain text characters
from the Western European languages, plus the standard
typewriter/programming symbols.  Unfortunately there's more than 191
of these, so something's got to give, and it's probably the claim that
Latin1 covers all Western Europe.  Unfortunately, whichever standard
covers the US will probably end up becoming the de facto standard for
international transmission, so we'll end up no better off than today.
Sighh...

Alan.
-- 
Alan Jeffrey         Tel: +46 31 72 10 98         jeffrey@cs.chalmers.se
Department of Computer Sciences, Chalmers University, Gothenburg, Sweden