🚀 go-pugleaf

keld@login.dkuug.dk (Keld J|rn Simonsen) writes:
> 
> Should one then just say "Use ISO 8859"? Well, what ISO 8859?
> There are several parts, latin 1, latin 2 (eastern Europe),
> Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic, Hebrew (among others)...
> We should do something that could cover the whole world.

This is what Unicode is for.  Unicode should be considered the most
useful and implementable subset of the draft standard ISO 10646.

Unicode is an unambiguous fixed-length 16-bit global codeset currently
under development by the Unicode Consortium.  Unicode offers a uniform
text and character standard that can encompass all living languages and
form a long-lasting basis for worldwide data exchange.  Unicode makes
all 65,535 slots available, with these constraints:

o The first 256 slots duplicate the arrangement of ASCII and ISO
  Latin-1.

o Characters unique to a language are grouped together in standard
  order.

o Letters, punctuation, symbols, and diacritics shared by multiple
  languages are grouped together.

o Asian pictographs are grouped together in order of frequency
  (as specified by national standards), then sorted in traditional
  radical/stroke order.

o Chinese, Japanese, and Korean phonetic symbols are grouped together
  by language in standard order.

The reason 16 bits are enough is that Asian pictographs which everyone
would recognize as the same have been unified.  Thus, more than 31,000
characters have been reduced to about 20,000 slots.

		Major Han Character Standards

	Country	  Standard	Year	Characters
	-------	  --------	----	----------
	China	   GB 2312	1980	 6,763
	Japan	 JIS X0208	1983	 6,349
	Korea	  KS C5601	1987	 4,888
	Taiwan	 CNS 11643	1986	13,051
					------
		     total		31,051

In addition to East Asian languages, here are the writing systems
currently available in Unicode: Greek, Cyrillic, Georgian, Armenian,
Hebrew, Arabic, Ethiopian, Devanagari, Bengali, Gurmukhi, Gujarti,
Oriya, Tamil, Telegu, Kannada, Malayalam, Sinhalese, Thai, Lao,
Burmese, Khmer, Tibetan, and Mongolian.