Re: Unicode, SMS, PDA/cellphones

From: Richard Wordingham (richard.wordingham@ntlworld.com)
Date: Thu Jun 01 2006 - 17:16:37 CDT

  • Next message: Cristian Secară: "Re: Unicode, SMS, PDA/cellphones"

    Cristian Secară" wrote on Thursday, June 01, 2006 at 9:25 PM

    > - very few peoples, like me, who know all those details, prefer _not_ to
    > send SMS w/ extended characters, because the 70 character size
    > limitation of a 16 bit SMS message is aberrant and shameless doubles+
    > the price

    That's why some of us are interested in the issue. There is a compression
    option (ETSI specification 03.42, also 23.42) that I think would typically
    squeeze in 160 (or more) characters of properly spelt Romanian without
    knowing what language it was. Unfortunately compression is optional for
    Unicoded text, and all the versions of the specification I have seen contain
    an obvious error, so I don't know whether there are any working
    implementations. It would work even better for Western European languages
    (or even Thai or Hindi) (perhaps 240 characters?), and there are extra
    options that can probably improve things still more, at least for English
    and German.

    I'm currently slowly working on getting some reliable numbers, but SMS
    messages are not normally properly spelt. There are bizarre abbreviations,
    like Thai '555' for laughter (because the word for '5' sounds similar to the
    Thai versions of 'ha!') and similarly a similar Chinese use of '4' because
    '4' looks like the ideograph for 'laugh'. (I'm not sure of the details of
    the Chinese usage.)

    Richard.



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