Programming and international character sets.

[E.GAUSS]

In article <8804 at smoke.BRL.MIL>, gwyn at smoke.BRL.MIL (Doug Gwyn ) asks:

> >How difficult is it convert american/english programs so that they can 
> >be used to handle foreign text? [etc.]
 
> In article <532 at krafla.rhi.hi.is> kjartan at rhi.hi.is (Kjartan R. Gudmundsson)
replies:

> Where have you been the last few years?  This subject area is known as
> "internationalization" and has been the featured topic of special issues ...

An author friend that I work with, Eb Colville, has been trying for a
number of years to find a VI editor that will handle the German characters
available in the extended ASCI characters on his MS-DOS  PC.  He used those
in his novel, THE LAST ZEPPELIN, which is trying to find a publisher.  Whatever
the talk, it does not seem to be possible to do this.  Extended ASCII
requires the full eight bits to be available, and all VI's that we have
seen simply toss away the lead bit folding umlauted characters into
control characters.  We ended up writing a filter so that Eb types u/e
when he wants an umlauted e and just before printing we run his text
through the filter which replaces it by the appropriate extended ASCII
character.  (It also unfolds the folded characters, but that is risky as
you cannot have any control characters hidden in your text.)  If your
wordprocessor does not balk at eight bit characters, this is a workable
way of putting the characters in in the first place.  Eb has been
asking about Cyrillic (Russian) characters  for his next novel, BEYOND THE
YUKON, and I have refused even to discuss this with him. 

There are methods for doing Japannese where the keyboardist types in
"Romanji" and the computer makes a guess at the konji.  I told Eb
that if he has any plans to try Japennese word processing he will have
to go to Japan.

Ed Gauss