I agree that ASCII is not SI - my keyboard has two non-ASCII characters on it - £ and €. (OK, I am using a British keyboard).
However, using the ISO 8859-1, one can generate °, · and µ by using the Alt keys. These are very useful for representing SI units. The only character that is strictly needed by SI units that is not available in ISO 8859-1 (or ISO-8859-15) is upper case omega (used for ohms). However ISO 8859 is being superceded by Unicode, so Ω (Upper case omega should have appeared) can be typed. The real driver for Unicode (I believe) was the Euro - in 2002 technology was ready for UTF-8 and the advent of the € symbol (0xA4 in ISO8859-15, not available in ISO8859-1 and 0x20AC in Unicode) forced the pace for standardisation. -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Patrick Moore Sent: 05 August 2009 19:33 To: U.S. Metric Association Subject: [USMA:45520] Re: US is metric! I believe the period is in ASCII but the intended raised dot is not. But ASCII is not SI, anyway. > From: Martin Vlietstra <[email protected]> > Reply-To: <[email protected]> > Date: Wed, 5 Aug 2009 18:46:14 +0100 > To: "U.S. Metric Association" <[email protected]> > Subject: [USMA:45515] Re: US is metric! > > > To be fair, "." is not on the ASCII keyboard. > > -----Original Message----- > From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf > Of Pierre Abbat > Sent: 05 August 2009 12:41 > To: U.S. Metric Association > Subject: [USMA:45504] Re: US is metric! > > > On Wednesday 05 August 2009 06:15:21 John Frewen-Lord wrote: >> This I stumbled upon recently. A letter from the US ITC to a resident of >> NH. See http://www.faqs.org/rulings/rulings2008NYN028158.html >> >> All metric ( and correct SI at that). > > "AH" isn't; it should be spelled "A.h", and the hour isn't metric, just > accepted for use with SI units. > > Pierre >
