From: kuhn@cs.purdue.edu
To: Multiple Recipients of
Subject: Re: New Draft ISO 8859-0
Date: Monday, July 14, 1997 3:54PM
>dan@watson.ibm.com wrote on 1997-07-14 15:21 UTC:
>> Alain:
> >That said, the EURO will be required anyway even if the character does
>>not
> >exist and it is going to cost money.
>>
> >The EURO exists (or will soon exist in 10646 and Unicode). That is
>> good enough. Face it, 8 bits is not enough for the EC. It is time to
> >just do it - convert to Unicode.
>Yea!
>In addition, let me note that the following EU currencies currently do not
>have a symbol associated with them in Latin-1, and that it is therefore
>*highly unlikely* that the users in those countries will start to
>miss it urgently on their typewriters and PC keyboards in 1999:
>Code Code
>Alpha Numeric Currency Entity
> ------- ------- ----------------------- ------------------------------
>ATS 040 Schilling Austria
>BEF 056 Belgian Franc Belgium
>CHF 756 Swiss Franc Liechtenstein Switzerland
>DEM 280 Deutsche Mark Germany
>DKK 208 Danish Krone Denmark
>ESP 724 Spanish Peseta Spain
>FIM 246 Markka Finland
>FRF 250 French Franc France
>GRD 300 Drachma Greece
>ITL 380 Lira Italy
>LUF 442 Luxembourg Franc Luxembourg
>NLG 528 Netherlands Guilder Netherlands
>I somehow suspect that this whole Latin-00 project is primarily motivated
>in order to get the LATIN LIGATURE OE for the French language back in, and
>that the EURO SYMBOL is just a convenient political trick to get broader
>support.
>How will Latin-00 be called eventually in the Standard? I guess "Latin
>Alphabet No. 7" and ISO 8859-11 will be the next free numbers, right?
>Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Science grad student, Purdue
>University, Indiana, USA -- email: kuhn@cs.purdue.edu
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Markus,
First of all, your inappropriate remarks about this being a trick just
to get the French OE ligature back into the character set misses the
mark, and slanders a few hardworking true gentlemen within SC2/WG3,
especially Alain LaBonte', the Project Editor of Latin 0. Latin 0 is
joint French/Canadien/Finnish/Irish/Danish proposal. In Crete last
week, SC2 voted to send the project request out for letter ballot.
There are 6 characters missing in 8859/1, 3 French and 4 Finnish. Both
of these languages are supposed to be completely covered in 8859/1 but
in fact are missing characters (UC/LC- OE ligature and UC- Y diaresis in
French; UC/LC- S caron and UC/LC- Z caron in Finnish). Latin 0 (yes,
zero) attempts to correct 8859/1 Latin 1 by providing a new base set.
The Eurocurrency code is EUR. It's symbol is a graphic looking like a
small "c" with 2 horizontal lines through it. Like the dollar sign,
which has both alpha form USD, and graphic "$" forms. Space is nearly
always an issue in numeric fields, which is why the European Commission
strongly wishes to have a single symbol for the Eurocurrency,
CEN TC 304 made a strong case for this in Crete.
The new Euro sign was allocated at 20ACH in ISO 10646. Note that the
"ce" graphic now at 20A0H has been proposed to be renamed the
ECU-CURRENCY SIGN. Remember that the policy in ISO 10646 is that
characters are NEVER moved, deleted, or substituted.
However, most European computers still use 8-bit character sets, and
probably will for several years (even after "Memphis"), no matter how
desireable it would be to use Unicode 2.0 or ISO 10646. Microsoft is
looking to define the Euro sign as 80H in most Windows code pages
1250-58, (88H in Cyrillic). Look for it on European keyboards... and
computer printers... starting next year. Remember, the EC market is
equal to the US market in size.
However, since in 8859/x the use of 80-9FH is not permitted, allocation
at B1H in place of "+-", while controversial (especially among
statisicians) it is not totally unreasonable.
BTW, Latin 7 (Baltic RIM) and Latin 8 (Celtic) are already allocated.
Clive Hohberger
Liaison, SC31 to SC2
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