bas+@andrew.cmu.edu (Bruce Sherwood) (08/31/87)
A couple people wrote personally to me asking me to send them the ISO 6937
standard, or how to order it.
ISO 6937/2-1983 (E) can be ordered from
American National Standards Institute
Department SD
1430 Broadway
New York NY 10018
I can't seem to find the cost, but I think it is about $35 for the paper
including shipping and handling ("Price based on 37 pages", according to the
cover sheet). Expensive -- but I may be wrong about the exact price.
Here is the gist of ISO 6937. It contains standard old ASCII in the slots 32
thru 126. In the upper (8-bit) slots from 161 thru 254 we have the list
shown below, divided into groups of 16 slots, with "---" indicating "not
assigned".
The key features are a full set of diacritic codes and a full set of letters
used by roman-letter alphabets which aren't in base ASCII and can't be made
with diacritics. Together these enable handling 41 different languages,
probably constituting almost all roman-letter scripts other than Vietnamese.
The codes in the column of diacritics function as escape codes, indicating
that it plus the following code constitute a 16-bit specification of a
complex character. That complex character may be rendered by superimposing a
letter and a diacritic, or some implementations may choose to have a separate
"rendering" set of images in which the diacritic is already on the letter
(this gives higher-quality print possibilities, of course).
Note that altho the diacritic code precedes the associated letter code, a
decent computer system should allow the user to type a diacritic key AFTER
the letter. Having to type it BEFORE is a bad holdover from mechanical
typewriters, which could handle diacritics only by implementing a "dead key"
which didn't advance the platen. Linguistically however it makes no sense to
type the diacritic before typing the letter, and it should be the job of the
input routine to turn the bytes around in memory.
InvertedExclamationPoint
Cent
Pound
Dollar
Yen
---
Section
---
LeftSingleQuote
LetfDoubleQuote
LeftDoubleGuillemet
LeftArrow
UpArrow
RightArrow
DownArrow
Degree
Plus/Minus
SuperTwo
SuperThree
Multiply
Micro
Paragraph
CenteredDot
Divide
RightSingleQuote
RightDoubleQuote
RightDoubleGuillemet
OneQuarter
OneHalf
ThreeQuarters
InvertedQuestionMark
---
Grave
Acute
Circumflex
Tilde
Macron
Breve
OverDot
Diaeresis
---
OverRing
Cedilla
Underline
DoubleAcute
Ogonek
Hachek
HorizontalBar
SuperOne
Registered
Copyright
Trademark
MusicNote
---
---
---
---
---
---
OneEighth
ThreeEighths
FiveEighths
SevenEighths
Ohm
UppercaseDigraphAE
UppercaseStrokeD
OrdinalA
UppercaseStrokeH
LowercaseDotlessJ
UppercaseDigraphIJ
UppercaseMiddleDotL
UppercaseStrokeL
UppercaseSlashO
UppercaseDigraphOE
OrdinalO
UppercaseThorn
UppercaseStrokeT
UppercaseEngma
LowercaseApostropheN
LowercaseGreenlandicK
LowercaseDigraphAE
LowercaseStrokeD
LowercaseEth
LowercaseStrokeH
LowercaseDotlessI
LowercaseDigraphIJ
LowercaseDotL
LowercaseStrokeL
LowercaseSlashO
LowercaseDigraphOE
LowercaseDoubleS
LowercaseThorn
LowercaseStrokeT
LowercaseEngma
Bruce Sherwood
Center for Design of Educational Computing
and Information Technology Center
Carnegie Mellon University