[comp.std.internat] International alphabet Standards

beach@herbarium.bpp.msu.edu (Jim Beach) (06/07/91)

I'm a biologist working with an international standards group for
biological information and one of our committees has come up with
a gazetteer for international place names.  

We're putting the final touches on the standard and wonder if we
should mention any particular character coding schemes for all the
foreign alphabet characters that are a part of our standard.

Would anyone provide advice?  Are there any stable international
character coding schemes?

Thanks very much.



Jim Beach                                       jhbeach@msu  (Bitnet)
Department of Botany and Plant Pathology        beach@herbarium.bpp.msu.edu
Michigan State University
East Lansing, Michigan 48824-1312, U.S.A 

hpa@casbah.acns.nwu.edu (H. Peter Anvin) (06/07/91)

In article <1991Jun7.142651.19529@msuinfo.cl.msu.edu> of comp.std.internat,
  beach@herbarium.bpp.msu.edu (Jim Beach) writes:
> 
> Would anyone provide advice?  Are there any stable international
> character coding schemes?
> 

UNICODE, although still not officially released, has been taken out of the
final review stage and should be quite stable.  If you can wait a few
months, UNICODE 1.0 (official edition) should be available.

UNICODE is a 16-bit code that encoded virtually any language, including
Chinese script and its derivatives (Japanese Kanji etc).

                /Peter
-- 
MAIL: hpa@casbah.acns.nwu.edu   (hpa@nwu.edu after this summer)
"finger" the address above for more information.

mohta@necom830.cc.titech.ac.jp (Masataka Ohta) (06/09/91)

In article <1991Jun7.155504.12959@casbah.acns.nwu.edu>
	hpa@casbah.acns.nwu.edu (H. Peter Anvin) writes:

>> Would anyone provide advice?  Are there any stable international
>> character coding schemes?

>UNICODE, although still not officially released, has been taken out of the
>final review stage and should be quite stable.  If you can wait a few
>months, UNICODE 1.0 (official edition) should be available.

An ISO level standard, 10646, is available as DIS.

>UNICODE is a 16-bit code that encoded virtually any language, including
>Chinese script and its derivatives (Japanese Kanji etc).

As a Japanese who use Kanji (there is more than 65536 Chinese characters), I
don't think UNICODE is usable.

						Masataka Ohta