The requirement for Euro was definitely very important, but as I remember
the discussions, it was only with very great difficulty that any examples
of Finnish text was produced. Much of the impetus for this was also a
desire by some people to replace Latin-1 with what was audaciously called
"Latin-zero". I'm thankful that that never happened - I can only guess at
the mess that would have resulted.
[Alain] "Replace", no, as *we* wanted to respect history. A replacement would have used the same number as before [Latin-1], as was done on the different versions of MS-1252. I was among those people you're talining about (and I am by chance currently in the room in Paris where this number 0 was first used, when I suggested it). "Latin-0" was just a "buzzword" to hit imagination [in fact it made its effect perfectly], a code name. We expected that it would not hold in ISO [which always counts starting in "origin 1", not "0"]. It became "Latin-9" (curiously, in French it reads "Latin neuf" ["neuf" means "9" and "brand new" at once in this context -- the words are exactly the same, as "latin" is masculin in French -- but in this case the renumbering happened fortuitously], or ISO/IEC 8859-15 (I sometimes tell myself it is 8859-1.5, the "1" that should have existed at once [but the EURO SIGN did not exist in 1987, of course]!!!)
it has been generated automatically for a while in data by WinWord (with
the Canadian keyboard I type it dicrectly myself).
[Brendan]
Ah - now you've hit the nail on the head. What on earth was wrong with
Unicode? For that is what WinWord uses to encode your favorite characters.
[Alain] Yes and no. Under the hood maybe. But it is not what is exchanged -- the majority of our current applications on different platforms are capable of exchanging 8-bit-fixed-length-precomposed data only (alas, we have to live with this for a while). And that is the problem. Missing French characters in ISO/IEC 8859-1 but which are [Bill, thank you for that one!], in MS-1252 [and of course in Unicode], can't be exchanged with the numerous applications we have on other platforms, in particular those using EBCDIC CECP code pages. There was a missing link, it is undeniable, and we filled the gap. We did our duty. It had to be done. It does not contradict Unicode, on the contrary, it is a comforting element for the latter... At least that is how the initial "Latin-0" team saw it... And we said it as well...
Alain LaBont�, project editor, ISO/IEC 8859-15 (Latin 9)
Paris (for a few hours)
