From keld@dkuug.dk Sun Feb 24 16:20:35 1991 Received: by dkuug.dk (5.64+/8+bit/IDA-1.2.8) id AA10355; Sun, 24 Feb 91 16:20:35 +0100 Date: Sun, 24 Feb 91 16:20:35 +0100 From: Keld J|rn Simonsen Message-Id: <9102241520.AA10355@dkuug.dk> To: i18n@dkuug.dk, iso10646@jhuvm.bitnet Subject: AT&T Bell Labs wishes for shorthand character names Cc: npn@sirius.att.com, wg14@dkuug.dk X-Charset: ASCII X-Char-Esc: 29 Hello character & i18n people! I have got this request from Nils-Peter Nelson, AT&T Bell Laboratories via Thom Plum, who is also in ISO SC22/WG14 (Programming language C). He asks for comments and information on this issue of shorthand for characters. Keld Date: Thu, 21 Feb 91 15:45 EST Original-From: sirius!npn (Nils-Peter Nelson +1 201 582 6078) To: plum@plumhall.com Subject: digraphs, trigraphs, etc. Some kind person send me a paper of yours from an unidentified publication which discusses the various ISO character sets. I've been working with Brian Kernighan on an ISO 8859-1 version of troff. Brian has already modified the code to accept the 8 bit input, and my group is currently working on the ditroff- to-PostScript conversion for the additional characters. (This is not trivial, since Adobe has neglected to provide font positions for many of the new characters, although the outlines and names are there.) As a favor to ASCII people we want to preserve the troff convention of providing ASCII digraphs for the new characters; however, we now see that the troff conventions differ from the commonly used VT200 terminal digraphs commonly used world-wide. As an example, the British Pound sign is \(ps in troff, but is typed as L - on most ISO 8859-1 terminals. My way of handling this is to change troff to use the VT200 digraphs in the future. I've spoken to Dennis Ritchie several times because he faces similar problems with C-- even if variable names are ASCII he wants to be able to handle ISO 8859 strings. What would avoid all the sturm-and-drang is if the ISO committees, as they agree on things like 8859-1,2,3,... and 10646 would provide *as part of the standard* the "shorthand" notation in the next "lower" character set. As an example, in 8859-1, character 10/03 might be defined by: 10/03 L- POUND SIGN (The digraph in this case must be two ISO 646 characters.) The standard would also recommend that, where 8 bit keyboards were not available, the sequence L - would be equivalent to 10/03. could be undefined-- on keyboards it's a key, in troff it would be \(, in C it might be something else. ISO 10646 would require a tetragraph, but again, it should be one recommended by the standards committee. Since you announced yourself to be the "contact person for the general public" I'm asking you to bring this to the attention of the various committees. If the standardization is not offered by ISO, we run the risk of different conventions in troff, TeX, C, MS-DOS, etc. Nils-Peter Nelson