🚀 go-pugleaf

I think John's on the right track.  We don't need to just decide on a
character set representation.  We also need to decide what needs to be
changed in UNIX.  You'll see two similar articles here: character sets
and UNIX commands.

Partly for the sake of discussion, I'm suggesting the NAPLPS protocol as
the character set standard.  It allows 7 or 8 bit data streams, and uses
escape codes for character set extension.  Graphics are part of the
standard and their device-independent resolution exceeds that of a
phototypesetting machine.  Comments?

In article <224@l5.uucp> gnu@l5.uucp (John Gilmore) writes:
>In article <6066@utzoo.UUCP>, henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer) writes:
>> > As far as character sets go, it would seem that 16 bits (65536
>> > possible characters) should be more than enough...
>> The trouble with this (and the other similar proposals) is it asks the
>> Western world to pay a factor of 2 in storage overhead for the sake of
>> the Asian character sets.
>I think the proposals are that a coding scheme for text be defined which
>allows 16-bit characters to be escape-coded into an 8-bit text stream.
>The arguments mostly center on what kind of coding scheme would fit both
>the needs of few-16-bit-char folks and few-8-bit-char folks without wasting
>too much storage for either.
>
>Internally to an international program, characters would be 16 bits,
>but stdio routines (printw, fprintw, sscanw, etc) would encode to a
>bytestream on the way in and out.  ("w" for "world" or "wide").
>
>(Hmm, the non-Unix-opsys people have been looking for a way to tell when
>we Unixoids are reading or writing a text file versus a binary file...now
>that we propose encoding our own text files, they will have the clue.)

(I'm biased towards NAPLPS because I have Viewtron's free Commodore-64
NAPLPS decoder program.  Not very biased..if the net comes up with a
new standard there'll be plenty of software for it.  Kick my straw man.)
-- 

Scot E. Wilcoxon  Minn. Ed. Comp. Corp.         circadia!mecc!sewilco
45 03 N / 93 15 W   (612)481-3507 {ihnp4,mgnetp}!dicomed!mecc!sewilco