Re: OEM codepages in Windows (was: Japanese Windows Code Page?)

From: Piotr Trzcionkowski (ptrzcionkowski@famur.com.pl)
Date: Fri Feb 11 2000 - 21:21:54 EST


> > Not as rarely, as you may think. E. g., I had to help a customer to read
> > text written in Polish (quotes from newspapers, I think), only a couple
> > of months ago; it turned out to be in CP 852 (DOS-Latin-2), with some
> > substitutions probably brought in by an ignorant person who had edited
> > the text in a German (DOS-Latin-1) locale with Word (pre-97 version).
> > Apparently, all users are not using the most recent hard- and software.
> >
> It gets worse. The encoding used almost universally in Poland is not
> CP852, nor Windows Latin-2, nor anything else you might expect. It's a
> home-grown PC Code Page called Mazovia, which is a version of CP437 with
> minimal substitutions to represent Polish.

It's rather nonsense what you wrote. Really, Mazowia WAS polish "standard" done that, or similar, way. It was used many years ago, when Dos hasn't support for cp-852 and some, rather short, time after. Later, we, exactly our national standard organization, defined PN-x?x?x (pol. Polska Norma) based on iso-8859-2. It was strange because no popular system didn't support that standard and on a marketplace were available systems, which provide good support for the polish characters by other coding. So, we was using many standards as cp-852, cp-1250, but no that defined ! When Internet was popularized the same happened with iso-8859 . By my oversight :-), some administrators "decided" to use ONLY iso-8859-2. They had enough time to watch users that they must use their (adms) strange standard. Of course they aren't competence to change coding standard at most popular operating system, so NOW in reality, still most popular is cp-1250. Using Unicode on forums controlled by Unix, mostly academic, fanatics is PROHIBITED ! After my news articles in utf-8 one of ignorant, add rule to his cancelbot.

> Bulgaria has a similar situation, but they call their code page CP856
> instead of making up a name for it as the Poles did. Unfortunately, there
> already is a CP856, and it ain't Bulgarian!

I think it is history :-)))



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