----- Original Message ----- From: "Martin Vlietstra" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Friday, 2001-04-06 02:54 Subject: [ukma] re: UNICODE I have just read the posting regarding UNICODE. May I put UNICODE into perspective for readers who know nothing about it. ASCII is a 7-bit character encoding standard. ISO-8251-1 to ISO-8251-15 (I think that the ISO number is correct) are fifteen 8-bit character encoding standards. All use ASCII for the lower half, but have different variants for the upper half of the character set. The variants are classified as "W European", "E European" etc. The upper half of ISO-8251-1 contains characters like �,�,�,�,�,�,� etc (I am writing this on a German keyboard). UNICODE is a 16 bit character encoding standard (65,565 possible characters). The first 255 characters are the ISO-8251-1 character set. Not all the remaining characters have been allocated. Groups of characters have been reserved for Modern Greek script, others for Ancient Greek, other for Cyrillic, Hebrew, Arabic and also the various Asian languages. There is a set of currency symbols etc. Large numbers of UNICODE locations are as yet unallocated. Special interest groups can petition the UNICODE committee to allocate spaces for their opwn character set - I know that the Star Trek community are trying to get the Klingon alphabet recorgnised as a standard subset of UNICODE. In response to the original posting - UNICODE represents what typographers want today and if if accomodates Ancient Greek symbols alongside the ancient Anglo-Saxon "thorn" symbol, then I see no point in trying to make them remove a few symbols that represent Imperial units. Rather we should use the faxct that these weird symbols exist, while the only nojn-Latin symbol needed for metric measure is � (mu). BTW, the Anglo-Saxon "thorn" symbol was pronounced "Th" and looks a little like a "Y" hence all the shop signs "Ye olde whatever".
