takayama@vcom.sony.co.jp (Yoshihisa Takayama) (12/20/89)
I wrote down my article in French language on Apple Macintosh personal computer. There problem is occured when I moved to IBM-PC with my article. Some characters does not appeared normally. ^a,^i,^u,^e,^o, 'a,'i,'u,'e,'o for instance. Which machine use IS (International Standart). And does French people have some kind of standard? Please forgive my ignorance. Give me more information!
minow@mountn.dec.com (Martin Minow) (12/20/89)
In article <TAKAYAMA.89Dec20102525@vcomsa.vcom.sony.co.jp>
takayama@vcom.sony.co.jp (Yoshihisa Takayama) discovered that the
French national letters in the standard Apple Macintosh character set
do not have the same internal coding as those characters on an IBM-PC,
and asks which machine uses an International Standard.
Unfortunately, neither directly support the ISO Latin-1 alphabet which
is the closest we have to an internationally recognized character set
for French. To move text between those computers, you will have to
apply some sort of translation algorithm.
Since character sets are user-definable on the Macintosh, you could --
with a fair amount of work -- define a keyboard mapping and display
font that implement the IBM PC character set on the Mac. I suspect that
that would be more trouble than it's worth, however.
Perhaps the best solution would be to write "import-export" routines
for both systems and use ISO Latin-1 as a common exchange format.
Martin Minow
minow@thundr.enet.dec.com
Ps: there are two 7-bit (ISO 646) character sets for French: one for France
and one for Canada. I would strongly recommend using ISO Latin-1 for
all new work, however.flavio@mitisft.Convergent.COM (Flavio Rose) (12/21/89)
Yoshihisa Takayama asks if there is an international standard for representing French. There is a standard called ISO Latin 1. It has ASCII in positions 32 through 126 and additional characters needed to write the Western European languages in positions 160 through 254. (There are also standards called ISO Latin 2 through 4, if I remember correctly, in which the contents of 160 through 254 are suitable for Eastern European languages.) These standards were approved around 1986, *after* Apple and IBM decided on how they would use positions 160 through 254. There's an American saying, "closing the barn door after the horse has left" or something like that. I do not know about French national standards.
leonard@bucket.UUCP (Leonard Erickson) (12/24/89)
takayama@vcom.sony.co.jp (Yoshihisa Takayama) writes: >I wrote down my article in French language on Apple Macintosh personal >computer. There problem is occured when I moved to IBM-PC with my >article. Some characters does not appeared normally. ^a,^i,^u,^e,^o, >'a,'i,'u,'e,'o for instance. Which machine use IS (International >Standart). And does French people have some kind of standard? >Please forgive my ignorance. Give me more information! First of all, there are *several* "international standards. Second, these standards disagree. Third *NO* personal computer that I am aware of uses any of them. Anything other that 7-bit ASCII is *totally* machine-dependent. Sorry, but you are stuck unless you use a wordprocessor that is available on both machines *and* has compatible file formats on both. -- Leonard Erickson ...!tektronix!reed!percival!bucket!leonard CIS: [70465,203] "I'm all in favor of keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of fools. Let's start with typewriters." -- Solomon Short
oster@dewey.soe.berkeley.edu (David Phillip Oster) (12/30/89)
takayama@vcom.sony.co.jp (Yoshihisa Takayama) writes: >I wrote down my article in French language on Apple Macintosh personal >computer. There problem is occured when I moved to IBM-PC with my >article. Some characters does not appeared normally. ^a,^i,^u,^e,^o, >'a,'i,'u,'e,'o for instance. Which machine use IS (International >Standart). And does French people have some kind of standard? >Please forgive my ignorance. Give me more information! Your Apple System Software release disks should contain a program called "Apple File Exchange" This program can convert from Apple's character set to the character set on an IBM PC. If you are using a Mac IIcx, MacIIci, SE 30, or one of the new SEs, Apple File Exchange can directly write PC compatible 3.5" disks. You would do best converting your word processor document to a text file, then running the text file through the converter, though the converter probably supports some word processor document formats. Apple, with its Script Manager, is trying hard to support all the world's scripts in your computer all at once. Other brands merely try to handle one or two languages at a time. As usual, Apple's products are ahead of the standards that the other brands are still trying to agree on, and are not yet in compliance with. For example, if you install the Kanji system, the Arabic system, and the Hebrew system all at once, you should be able to get all three langauges, plus English, French & German, on the same line all at once, using the ROM text editor, TextEdit. The keyboard should remap as you change language families, and you should be able to print. I have these systems on the Developer Tools CDROM apple sent me, but since my CD ROM drive hasn't arrived, I haven't yet given the above experiment a try. --- David Phillip Oster -- No, I come from Boston. I just work Arpa: oster@dewey.soe.berkeley.edu -- in cyberspace. Uucp: {uwvax,decvax}!ucbvax!oster%dewey.soe.berkeley.edu