Markus Kuhn answering the question from Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS wrote:
The list Markus gave looks pretty complete to me.
> Add to that ... the many Persian languages that are not
> covered by ISO 8859-6.
More accurately, other languages written in Arabic script
including Persian (Farsi) itself.
[snip]
> For instance, there are over a dozen "ISO coded character sets
> for bibliographic information exchange" that together also
> cover most languages that Unicode covers,
Not true.
ISO bibliographic standards do not provide for the scripts of
East Asia, nor for Indic scripts or any of the scripts used in
South-East Asia (except Latin and Arabic). There is a US
bibliographic standard (ANSI/NISO Z39.64) that encodes Chinese
ideographs, Japanese kana, and Korean hangul.
The ISO bibliographic standards provide well for languages
written in Latin, Cyrillic, Hebrew and Arabic scripts. (ISO
6438 for African letters that Markus mentioned is one of these.)
There are also ISO bibliographic standards covering the alphabets
of Greek (including combining marks for Polytonic Greek),
Armenian, and Georgian, plus a Math set (not as extensive as
the math content of Unicode).
> but these are only implemented in highly specialized systems
> and are quickly being replaced by Unicode.
True.
There is great enthusiasm for Unicode in the library community.
But there's a huge mass of legacy data (library automation
started in 1968) to deal with.
[snip remainder]
-- Joan Aliprand
Research Libraries Group
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