Subject: What Are The ISO-8859-x Standards?

From: "Jim Buck, (206) 965-6072" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 9 May 1994 09:29:18 -0700 (PDT)

I wonder what they are ... probably can't display them with VT-100 telnet...

--
Thanks, Jim Buck <[email-masked]>

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From: [email-masked] (Barry Bouwsma)
Date: Sun, 15 May 1994 02:47:59 -0400

>I wonder what they are ... probably can't display them with VT-100 telnet...

    The ISO-8859 standards are ways of representing languages other
than US-ASCII-based English, primarily European languages.  Asian
languages use a different set of standards.
    The most common subset of ISO8859 is that used by western
European languages, ISO-8859-1, and can be used for French, German,
Spanish, Swedish, and so on.
    All these subsets have in common that their first 128 characters
are equivalent to US-ASCII, and that the remaining 128 characters
(those with bit 8 set, or 8-bit characters) are used for additional
characters and diacritics, although the first 32 of them, just as
the first 32 ASCII characters, are control characters.
    Other ISO8859 subsets can be used to write eastern European
languages, or Greek, or Russian, or Hebrew, or Arabic...

    A true real-honest-to-goodness VT100 terminal does not have the
ability to display more than the ASCII characters.  However, many
terminal emulators which more-or-less follow the VT100 standard
have the ability to display additional 8-bit characters.  Telnet
itself will pass along this 8-bit data; for other connections, you
may have to make sure your configuration passes 8-bit data.
    If you're running a VT100 emulator on a PC or something, you
may see 8-bit data as funny Greek and other incorrect characters,
since the PC code page probably does not match ISO8859-1.  You can
probably translate the 8-bit characters to the correct ones, or
find a code page which has the correct characters in the correct
positions.  An example of this would be MS-Kermit; however, NCSA
telnet for the PC does not pass 8-bit data.

    If you are looking for code pages or fonts to view various of
the ISO8859 subsets, I set up the anonymous FTP server at ftp.vszbr.cz
with two directories under /pub:  PC-fonts and X11-fonts.  The first
contains lots of fun fonts, and under the latter, you can find a few
fonts for all the ISO8859 subsets except Hebrew (which should be
included in the standard X distribution), and Arabic.  Consult your
local system documentation for what to do with them...

    As Pine permits you to send mail using any of the ISO8859 subsets
and will pass along the 8-bit data it receives in MIME format, you
can use the fonts above to view practically any message sent with
one of these character sets.  Fonts for viewing other encodings,
such as Asian languages, could be found elsewhere, although there
is a Thai font on ftp.vszbr.cz, and more I've forgotten.

    Hope that's what you wanted to know and more...

--
  Barry Bouwsma, back in Michigan, wishes he were in Europe
 MIME mail to  <[email-masked]> , ASCII text to  <[email-masked]>
Unemployed System Cracker and Unix Administrator, seeking work, food,
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