Re: lynx-dev character sets

[Heikki Kantola]

According to Doug Kaufman <address@hidden>:
> On Thu, 3 Sep 1998, Leonid Pauzner wrote: 
> > I made an attempt to clarify the situation:
> > preferred doc charset now moved to another part of options menu,
> > and Display Character Sets names in options menu changed
> > to make them more human-readable (this not affect internal MIME names :-)).
> 
> I think that there are a few problems with the changes. Many who need
> non-western character sets will know it. I wouldn't get away from
> standard nomenclature, however. I don't think that there is a "-"
> between ISO and 8859 in the official names.

I think so too, but in context of MIME charset names (which the names
in parentheses appear to be) there's usually that '-'.

> > #    Western (ISO-8859-1)
> 
> This is generally known as Latin1. I think we should use that name.
> (e.g. Latin1 (ISO 8859-1). 

Still Latin 1 covers most of the Western languages so the description is
quite ok IMHO, although it wouldn't hurt to include "Latin 1" somewhere.

> > #    Western (cp850)
> 
> Perhaps call this the DOS International Character Set.

That still sounds somewhat awkward, but I agree that it would be nice to
say it's one of the DOS codepages.

> > #    Central European (ISO-8859-2)
> 
> I would use Latin2 (ISO 8859-2).
>
> > #    Central European (cp852)
> 
> I would indicate that this is a DOS codepage. Isn't this usually called
> "Eastern European"? I thought central Europe was Germany.

Well, it's matter of definition where the line between Eastern and
Central Europe goes. Netscape uses "Central Europe" as Latin 2's 
description, while <URL:http://czyborra.com/charsets/iso8859.html>
calls it "Eastern European", although later notes that "Latin2 covers
the languages of Central and Eastern Europe" and that Latin 1-6 all do
have the characters required for writing German in same positions...

> How about "DOS Central (or Eastern) European (cp852)", or will this take
> up too much space?

I would vote for "DOS Central and Eastern European (cp852)" and
similarly "Latin 2 - Central and Eastern European (ISO 8859-2)" as
long as space allows that.

-- 
Heikki "Hezu" Kantola, <address@hidden>
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