Subject: Re: request for feedback on character set identification proposal

From: Frank da Cruz <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 4 Sep 92 11:30:51 EDT

In adapting the Kermit file transfer protocol to handle conversion of
character sets, we have addressed many of the issues raised by Jurgen Bettels
in his paper, "Identification of Character Collections and Encodings".

Our basic conclusion was that only registered ISO standard character sets
should be used within the transfer syntax, and local (often proprietary)
character sets, and conversion between them and a standard transfer character
set, were the business of the application software on the local computer.  A
simple notation was developed to allow the sender to identify the transfer
character set to the receiver.

A major issue concerns the invertible translation between a proprietary
character set, such as IBM code pages or the character sets used on the
Macintosh, and the corresponding standard character set, such as ISO 8859-1.
IBM is (to our knowledge) the only major originator of proprietary character
sets that has published official translations.  In the absence of official
translations, the maker of each application is left to devise her own,
resulting in multiple incompatible translations.

The paper "A Kermit Protocol Extension for International Character Sets"
describes in detail the problems of character-set identification and
translation and our approach to solving them.  It can be obtained via
anonymous FTP from watsun.cc.columbia.edu [128.59.39.2] as kermit/e/isok7.txt,
or, on BITNET/EARN, by sending e-mail to KERMSRV@CUVMA containing the text
"MAIL ISOK7.TXT".  The techniques described in the paper have been
successfully implemented in Kermit software for the IBM PC, UNIX, VAX/VMS, IBM
mainframes, and many other computers.

Christine M. Gianone
Frank da Cruz

Columbia University, New York City