On Sat, Aug 21, 2004, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote about "charset iso-8859-8-i":
> My question refers to an old message of yours (about one year ago) in
> which ou mention this character set:
> What is the difference between this set and the iso-8859-8 ?
> On my system (debian/testing, kernel 2.4.?? ) ican find only the latter.
> If there are differences, please indicate where can I find the -i
> version.
The two are exactly the same encoding. The only difference is in the
semantics of the character order. iso-8859-8-i is the "logical" encoding,
where the letters come in logical, read-out-loud order. When you go down
to write (present on the screen) text in this encoding, you write it from
right to left. When you use Iso-8859-8 encoding, you are specifying the
"visual" order, i.e., you're asking the characters to be displayed from
left to right (as is the usual for, say, English) - this usually means that
your Hebrew text is reversed (last character first) in order for this visual
layout to make sense.
iso-8859-8 (without -i), the "visual order", is the old encoding used in
legacy applications that had no bidi support. There's no reason to use it
nowadays, and especially not in long plain texts (documents, emails, etc.).
It is unfortunate that the standard bodies chose to make the unadorned
encoding name (iso-8859-8) the obsolete one, and to make the one with an
extra "-i" to be the one of choice. This often causes confusion, with
"iso-8859-8" being used colloquially as a synonym for iso-8859-8-i.
--
Nadav Har'El | Saturday, Aug 21 2004, 4 Elul 5764
[EMAIL PROTECTED] |-----------------------------------------
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http://nadav.harel.org.il |unless you REALLY know what you're doing!
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