pfeiffer@cix.cict.fr (Daniel Pfeiffer) (06/27/91)
In article <JF4{J9=@cck.cov.ac.uk> esz001@cck.cov.ac.uk (Will Overington) writes: > In article <1991Jun26.215634.578@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu> phil@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu > (Phil Howard KA9WGN) writes: > >Is there yet a standardized character set code for Esperanto? I > >asked about this a few years ago and the general response I got was > >"I never heard of one". > >With the ongoing momentum of ISO-10646 and UNICODE character set > >standards, I would think there might be one by now, at least in a > >proposed/draft stage for one of the above. At least UNICODE has > >committed to the inclusion of all languages, even "dead" ones. > >Well, Esperanto is certainly alive and kicking, so where is the > >code? > >I want this for a terminal program I am writing for a PC. It will > >support telnet, serial, and eventually rlogin, access. It will > >also have a built in editor for editing remote files with the speed > >of a local editor. > I think that such a character coding would be valuable. > I am doing some work on a videotex style program for a PC and I would > like to build in the possibility of handling esperanto characters. > I think that the best way forward would be for you to set down specific > suggestions to the group, then anyone can comment and within a week or > two we can probably all agree on our own 'standard' coding scheme. > Once we have done this, I feel that, the way things are, it is likely > that, eventually, that would be the recognized way of doing things. > I have in front of me the character set for the PC computer. > I believe that we would need 12 special character code numbers. > There appear to be 18 character codes to use, so why not specify the > six surplus codes while we are at it. Shall we complete the Scandinavian > and Icelandic requirements, or shall we add in the characters needed by > some African languages? I know very little about these, but I think that > there are only a few of them. All this toying about with 256 character codes seems to be a failure to me. This is why we don't have Esperanto characters in the first place, because there are more roman characters with diacritical signs throughout the world than would fit. What do you mean Scandinavian and Icelandic? We are Esperantist, thus I hope by definition open to even the most insignificant languages!!! So how dare you suggest that some languages be left out? What is needed is a TeX or PostScript like combination of plain roman characters and all the diacritical signs that may exist. Though I'm not sure how to handle Viet-Namese -- I suppose this scheme would require graphics. On top of that we must add special letters such as Icelandic crossed `d', Spanish upside down `?', German Eszet, Polish crossed `l' etc. I beleive that Unicode is a 16-bit code. This is definitely rich enough to cover all languages, but it seems like a big waste if you don't need Chinese (which alone covers maybe 50000 codes). And given the complexity of Arabic script this would either require many context-sensitive codes or a very inteligent program if we want to see something beautiful. My favorite idea, unless waste of memory really carries no penalty any longer, would be to have a Roman based 7-bit system (that's called Ascii) and to have characters with the high bit on be modifiers of the following character. No modifiers would be plain Ascii, one modifier (e.g. hat on next letter) would give us Esperanto and all other European languages, several modifiers might be good for Viet-Namese. Since we have 128 modifiers, only 10-15 of which are needed for roman, the others might mean additional symbols and other alphabets (greek, cyrillic, ...). +---------------+ | * * * | | * * | Beware - polyglot esperantist | * * | | * * | | * * * | +---------------+ | | Daniel Pfeiffer <pfeiffer@cix.cict.fr> | Tolosa (Toulouse), Midi-Pyrenees, Europe <pfeiffer@irit.fr> | <pfeiffer@frcict81.bitnet> |