iiitsh@cybaswan.UUCP (Steve Hosgood) (04/09/90)
In article <2730001@hpgnd.HP.COM> arne@hpgnd.HP.COM (Arne LUHRS) writes: >davidsen@sixhub.UUCP (Wm E. Davidsen Jr) writes >In article <1613@krafla.rhi.hi.is> einari@rhi.hi.is (Einar Indridason) writes: > >| I certainly will keep that in mind, but for most readers in the usa >| and europe it's not a problem. The eighth bit seems to be used in >| Scandanavian countries and Iceland. > >Sorry but this just isn't true. The ONLY country in Europe which is NOT >affected to badly by 7bit character sets is the UK (They just loose the >pound sign). > That's nearly correct, but actually what often happens is that UK equipment has the so-called 'national characters' rearranged so that the pound-sign can be included. This then causes all sorts of irritations, like finding your C-programs being displayed with "<poundsign>include XXX" lines which look really horrid. Similarly, keyboard layouts are often 'got at' to move the wretched pound-sign into a prime site. 'National characters' are the worst kludge in ASCII. My sympathies are with the Icelanders, Scandinavians, French, Germans etc... The *BIG* question is: when is the 8 bit version of NEWS coming out? (Complete of course with ability to switch from any ISO LATIN/xxx character set to any other in an organised manner - just right for soc.culture.esperanto people and zillions of others) Steve
prc@erbe.se (Robert Claeson) (04/14/90)
In article <1741@cybaswan.UUCP>, iiitsh@cybaswan.UUCP (Steve Hosgood) writes: > That's nearly correct, but actually what often happens is that UK equipment > has the so-called 'national characters' rearranged so that the pound-sign > can be included. This then causes all sorts of irritations, like finding > your C-programs being displayed with "<poundsign>include XXX" lines which > look really horrid. Then, let's add the U.K. to the list of countries that needs 8 bit characters. > My sympathies are with the Icelanders, Scandinavians, French, Germans etc... > The *BIG* question is: when is the 8 bit version of NEWS coming out? > (Complete of course with ability to switch from any ISO LATIN/xxx character > set to any other in an organised manner - just right for soc.culture.esperanto > people and zillions of others) They already run 8-bit news in Iceland. As I understand it, there is a set of patches available in Iceland to make B news 2.11 use 8 bit characters. Rn isn't that easy to patch, though. And the Icelandic patches doesn't (again, as I understand it) allow for ISO 2022 character set shift sequences to be used to transparently shift among different character sets. Would anyone from Iceland be willing to comment on this? -- Robert Claeson E-mail: rclaeson@erbe.se ERBE DATA AB
marius@rhi.hi.is (Marius Olafsson) (04/15/90)
prc@erbe.se (Robert Claeson) writes: >They already run 8-bit news in Iceland. As I understand it, there is a set >of patches available in Iceland to make B news 2.11 use 8 bit characters. >Rn isn't that easy to patch, though. And the Icelandic patches doesn't >(again, as I understand it) allow for ISO 2022 character set shift sequences >to be used to transparently shift among different character sets. This is correct, our patches simply consist of cleaning up the code to use the ctype macros (ctype.h) for all character classifications, and then use an ISO8859/1 version of these macros when compiling. The patches to the news system itself were trivial (inews, etc..) and only slightly worse for the readers (vnews, vn, rn and nn). We have no mechanism to shift among different character sets as 8859/1 is the standard character set here and a prereq for connection. -- Marius Olafsson internet: marius@rhi.hi.is University of Iceland UUCP: {mcsun,sunic,uunet}!isgate!rhi!marius