Re: problems with german umlauts

[Werner LEMBERG]

> After having defined a 128 character table (0 -127 on 8 bits, well
> one zero + 7bits) covering only the English characters and some
> signs, called the ASCII table; has been defined many extended tables
> using the 128 - 255 range to store some "regional" character. There
> are around 10 extended tables to fit with either the french, the
> danish, the Greek specificities (but not all at the same time) :
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:ISO_8859

Actually, there are much more.  If I'm not mistaken, the ISO 2022
registry has designed IDs to over 100 different 8bit character sets!

> Japaneses and Chineses had some strange way to store their 36 000
> ideograms and there it started to be a mess.

This isn't true in general.  For handling those languages separately,
16bit character sets work just fine.  Emacs demonstrates that, within
the ISO 2022 framework, multilingual work can be done quite
efficiently.

BTW, the value `36000' is not correct: The CNS 11643 character set
defines around 55000 Chinese characters, and the defunct CCCII
character set covered around 70000 characters (I have the books at
home -- it's almost a half meter on my bookshelf).


    Werner