fdc@WATSUN.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU (Frank da Cruz) (08/10/89)
We're trying to find out how ISO applications, such as FTAM (File Transfer And Management) or X.400 (Message Handling System), cope with international character sets. We have a copy of ISO/DIS 8571/1-4 1986 (FTAM), and find no specific references to character sets in it. However 8571/4, which describes FTAM's transfer syntax, says that ASN.1 (ISO 8824) is used to specify data types, and it refers to the GraphicString Simple Type, using: [UNIVERSAL 22] -> ISO646String as an example. ISO 646 is, of course, roughly equivalent to 7-bit ASCII, and therefore usually incapable of representing words in more than one language. For X.400, we have the 1984 CCITT Recommendations. In particular, Section 2 of X.408 lists nine possible types of coded information: TLX (CCITT F.1), IA5 Text (CCITT T.50), TTX (CCITT T.61), G3 Fax (T.4, T.30), TIF0 (T.73), Videotex (T.100, T.101), Voice (further study), SFD (X.420, T.61), TIF1 (T.73). IA5 is International Alphabet 5, equivalent to ISO 646, or 7-bit ASCII. T.61 is the character set used in international (i.e. European) telegraphy, in which Roman letters may be combined with diacritics which are transmitted separately. There's no mention of any of the ISO-8859 Latin alphabets, let alone Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, or Cyrillic, and certainly nothing to indicate a concern for Japanese, Chinese, Korean, etc. We also have a copy of ISO/DIS 9040, Virtual Terminal Service, 1986. Unlike FTAM and X.400, this application defines its repertoire to include a set of up to four coded character sets as defined in ISO 2022, designatable by the escape sequences of ISO 2022 and ISO 2375 and the International Register of Coded Character Sets. Our questions are: Have X.400 and FTAM been updated to incorporate the ISO 8859 and other registered 8-bit single-byte or multibyte character sets? Are there any other applications besides Virtual Terminal Service which claim to do so? Are there any examples of these applications which actually work in the real world? Finally, does ASN.1 include mechanisms for designating character sets? These questions are in connection with our efforts to extend the Kermit file transfer protocol to work with text files written in languages other than English. Thank you! - Christine Gianone and Frank da Cruz, Columbia University