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ISO character sets (News)

1991-06-04 16:36:46
On Jun 4, 12:57pm, Neil Katin wrote:
Subject: Re: ISO 2022


% I guess I really don't have the same model of how (for example)
% 10646 is intended to be used.  I suspect that everyone will want
% their own personal character set to be represented.  Specifically
% people in Japan will want the Japanese glyphs, people in China
% will want Chinese encodings, Taiwan has a different set of encodings,
% Korea yet another set, and I haven't even touched on all the ISO8859
% variants.

The Chinese/Japanese/Koreans have reportedly agreed to unifying their
common glyphs so that there is a 1-1 mapping between the glyph and the
encoding in 10646 (This is a recent development and old drafts don't
show this).

  In fact, ISO 10646 will be a character set encoding, rather than
being a mechanism to add arbitrary new character sets.  The goal of
ISO 10646 is to handle all languages and commonly used glyphs.  It
is very different from ISO 2022.

  Late breaking news according to the UNICODE mailing list is that the
ISO 10646 Working Group and the UNICODE Working Group appear to have
agreed on a framework to merge their efforts.  This isn't a done deal
yet, but it appears likely and my earlier disbelief that it was likely
appears to have been misplaced.

  One other item that might be a problem in the context of enhanced
mail is that it appears that a proposal to permit real glyphs (rather
than control codes) to appear in the C0 and C1 spaces in the encoding
has sufficient support to actually happen.

  This might be bad for us because it means that a conforming enhanced
MTA implementation might mistake a single octet of a multi-octet
character to be a CR or LF control character.  If my information is
correct then the only "safe" way to transport an ISO 10646 encoded
text message might be to use a binary transport encoding like base64.
The details of this aren't immediately available to me and so I might
be wrong about this, but thought it worth mentioning.

I'll be gone for a few days, but will read any reactions or other news
once I return. :-)

Regards,

  Randall Atkinson
  randall(_at_)Virginia(_dot_)EDU



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