Subject: Re: ISO 8859.1 charmap

From: Keld J|rn Simonsen <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 22 Nov 90 22:37:00 +0100

Now we have seen 3 ways of naming characters for charmaps.
Greger wanted comments on his....

To illustrate this, the 3 namings for LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH
CIRCUMFLEX are:

X/Open: ^a
Greger: a-circumflex
DS: a>

I am the originator of the Danish Standrds (DS) namings, which are
the most elaborate of the 3, as far as I know. It currently covers over 90
character sets with some 1200 non-ideogrammic and some 17000 ideogrammic
characters named and tabulated. 

Well, I am not in favour of the long names of Greger's naming scheme.
For one thing, DS has specified in the Danish POSIX profile that
these names can be used for generating and presenting characters 
at a terminal, and long names makes typing errors more frequent,
and also display less easy to read. Even in locale specifications
long names simply spoil the reading. Less readable specifications
are more error-prone and more expensive to generate and maintain.

Using Greger's scheme August in French is: <A><o><u-circumflex><t>,
my sheme has: <a><o><u>>><t>
(I wonder why August is beginning with a capital letter though,
is that French? I did not learn that in school).

Another thing is that long names lead to longer specifications
which cost more to store, transmit, present... It is more expensive.

The X/Open scheme: well I am not sure if it is a scheme. 
It might just be the ISO 8859-1 characters as they are coded,
I am not suer. Maybe somebody out there could tell more about it.

Keld