[Date Prev][Date Next] [Thread Prev][Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]

Re: support for multilingual Packages files?



Hi,

At Wed, 18 Jul 2001 16:54:18 +0200,
Radovan Garabik <garabik@melkor.dnp.fmph.uniba.sk> wrote:

> s/europeans/west europeans/
> 
> > 
> > You are saying of ISO 646 variants.  It is true that ISO 646 era
> > was a confused age and ISO-8859 united the European world.  Similarly,
> 
> United????

You are right. s/european/west european/ .  ISO-8859-1 is a common
encoding for west europeans, ISO-8859-2 for ....

However, at least GL (ASCII) part is common when we use one of ISO-8859-*.

Question:  how are the ISO-646 variants popular in European and other
world?

In Japan, MS and Apple use Shift_JIS, which contains ISO-646 Japanese
version (Yen sign for 0x5c instead of backslash in ASCII, overbar for
0x7e instead of tilde in ASCII).  However, though Shift_JIS is the
only encoding for most Japanese people (because MS Windows almost
dominates the market), it is not supported as a locale encoding in
Debian.

MS does some funny thing.  They maps 0x5c in Shift_JIS into U+005c.
This is needed because 0x5c is important as directory separater for
Windows.  On the other hand, MS font has Yen Sign for U+005c.


> Not speaking about (rather successful) Microsoft's effort to push 
> its own incompatible encodings into the market.

I don't know how popular such encodings are in Debian or Linux or
UNIX.  Is that important in our discussion?  (I.e., Debian supporting
LANG=**_**.CP*** is important?)

---
Tomohiro KUBOTA <kubota@debian.org>
http://www.debian.or.jp/~kubota/
"Introduction to I18N"  http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/intro-i18n/



Reply to: