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