[net.text] A slightly other suggestion.

kimcm@diku.UUCP (Kim Christian Madsen) (07/21/85)

   I know this is a little out of the original discussion, but I think
the right solution must be to redefine the ASCII-Alphabet or making a
new character-standard. Thus allowing *ALL* characters used in countries
using latin letters.

   The convention could be that the special letters might be integrated
in the existing alphabet - Thus (icelandic) "d" (-d) is placed before "e" 
and after "d".

   If such a standard could be made and be accepted then we would all
have the special characters to play with. And not be satisfied with having
only ae /o oa  or { | } but not both....

-- 
Kim Chr. Madsen   Datalogisk Institut (Institute of CS)
		  University of Copenhagen
{decvax,philabs,seismo}!mcvax!kimcm@diku.UUCP

keld@diku.UUCP (Keld J|rn Simonsen) (07/21/85)

There are such new ISO standards where all characters in the
8 bit set are defined (almost, I think there are 2 left positions
in there). The scheme is that the lowest 128 positions are equivalent to
ISO 646 international reference version and the upper part corre-
sponding to the *letters* in the lower part, are also letters. And there
is a correspondance between these letters in lower case and in upper
case like in the 7-bit part. You can exchange positions in the 7-bit
part with positions in the 8-bit part so for instance you can have an AE
in the right place (according to the Danish Standard DS 2089). Thus you
have backwards compatibility with ISO 646. I cannot give you the ISO
numbers right now, but I have them somewhere. There is both a Western
European version and an Eastern European version.

But as Kim says, this has nothing to do with the troff special char
discussion I raised. It can of cause be combined at some stage,
but not at the immediate level. Troff is still 7-bit, like the rest of
the world.