Subject: Re: EURO SIGN and ISO/IEC 9995-3

From: Alain LaBonté - 2 <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 04 Dec 1997 08:14:37 -0500

A 07:25 04/12/97 EST, [email-masked] a écrit :
>*** Resending note of 04/12/97 12:33
>
>Alain, Thankyou for the information from JTC1/WG5 about
>the modification of 9995-3 FPDAM1 you are mandated to do.
>As you hopefully saw we sent the comments below in advance
>to this meeting. Could you please tell us the reason why
>not SHY was chosen. We thought this was a good choice.

[Alain] :
Because of unfounded opposition but we listened it anyway (and because it
was not critical and any opoposition in this issue is not good, it does not
deserve any positive purpose), and also because Apple, IBM UK and France
believed that opening the 3rd level was a solution that disturbed less and
they chose (my opinion was not the one they chose, at first sight, but at
the end I believe it is not that bad) to replace the CURRENCY SIGN at level
2 of group 2 by the EURO SYGN and pushing the CURRENCY SIGN to level 3. 

Other a posteriori reason, which was not planned (I had not even envisaged
it) but came as a goodie : Current applications which use Latin 1 for the
CURRENCY SIGN will be able, *without change* in current implementations of
ISO/IEC 9995-3, to type the EURO SIGN at the same location as the CURRENCY
SIGN and it will automatically be encoded (without changes in applications)
as the Latin 0 character for EURO SIGN, if all goes as planned for ISO/IEC
8859-15. This should not have been a reason (and it was not an a priopri
reason, and you won't see it written becuase it was unintentional), because
keyboard layouts are totally decoupled and should be totally decoupled from
coding, but this is a practical goodie that comes by enchantment. There is
a God.

Alain LaBonté
Toronto
____________
>Comments on
>ISO/IEC JTC1/SC18/WG9 N1749
>Proposed Draft Amendment 1 to ISO/IEC 9995-3
>
>We recognise the importance of the inclusion of the EURO SIGN
>in ISO/IEC 9995 standards and fully support the proposal to
>replace the SOFT HYPHEN on E00 group 2 level 2 with the EURO SIGN.
>
>But, we can't agree with the comments on the usage of the
>SOFT HYPHEN in the rationale. The character is widely used
>in word processing and is present in most 8-bit character
>sets (ISO/IEC 8859, ISO/IEC 6937 and many vendor specified
>character sets). Therefore the character should have a defined
>allocation. This requirement is fulfilled by ISO/IEC 9995-2,
>Annex A, Note 4 on figure A.1 [The graphic character Soft
>Hyphen, if present, is preferably allocated to level 3
>of the key to which the normal Hyphen is allocated].
>
>The rationale should instead point out that location E00
>group 2 level 2 was "reserved for future standardization"
>in the old ISO 8884 standard and that SOFT HYPHEN has an
>alternative location (even if it is only informative)
>[level 3 of hyphen key]. It's also a logical location for a
>euro sign since both the currency, pound and dollar
>signs are allocated to the same row and level.
>
>We recommend that the proposed paragraph at the note 3
>following table 1 is deleted. Recommendations on national
>keyboard layouts are not within the scope of this standard.
>ISO/IEC 9995-2, Annex A has allocation guidelines, but doesn't
>specify any special characters. Therefore we should also leave
>the EURO SIGN allocation in level 3 for the national standards.
>Some national bodies may already have an other character placed
>on the proposed location, may propose allocation of EURO SIGN
>to level 1 or 2 in group 1 or may decide not to include the
>EURO SIGN in the national layout. We welcome international
>guidelines, but further studies are required for that.