Re: tlug: Umlauts & Kanji

[jwb@example.com (Jim Breen)]

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tlug note from jwb@example.com (Jim Breen)
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On Sep 18,  4:26pm, "Stephen J. Turnbull" wrote:
} Subject: Re: tlug: Umlauts & Kanji
>> 
>> You mean (?):
>> <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; CHARSET=x-euc-jp">

Yep.

>> If you are mixing files with different charsets in the same directory,
>> what Thomas is doing is probably best, because you can do
>> "jconv -ij file.JIS.html -os file.SJIS.html".  It's easy to forget to
>> fix those META elements if you translate the file to another charset.
>> I've embarrassed myself pretty badly that way (generates unfixable
>> mojibake on conformant browsers).

I can't imagine needing to convert existing .html from one coding to
another.

>>     >>> problem #2: how can I mix German and Japanese, or rather
>>     >>> Umlauts and Kana/Kanji in the same frame? The way I understand
>>     >>> what I read in Lunde, it's not possible to mix those with
>>     >>> SJIS, since the Umlauts are not included in the character
>>     >>> table. How'bout Unicode? Anybody interested in more results
>>     >>> should I ever get them?
>> 
>>     Jim> At present I think you need to do it by coding your Japanese
>>     Jim> as iso-2022-jp. For the two-byte codes such as EUC and SJIS,
>>                                  ~~~~~~~~
>> 8-bit? ------------------------------+

No, I meant two-byte, i.e. 16-bit (OK, EUC can be 3-bytes).

>>     Jim> the code ranges collide with those in iso-8859-1, so the
>>     Jim> normal way of doing "Latin" diacritic marks is not available.
>> 
>> I believe the Mule/W3 sample page includes EUC Japanese, not
>> ISO-2022-JP, but I could be wrong.  Aren't mode shifts possible in
>> 8-bit EUC?

Have you got a URL for this? I thought Mule stuck to ISO-2022 so that it
could be multi-lingual.

EUC doesn't have mode shifts, unless you call the "8F" a shift into
JIS212. (I don't; I regard i as a 3-byte code.)

>> However, it don't matter much.  AFAIK only Mule/W3 handles
>> _multilingual_ text as opposed to localized text (eg, AFAICT Netscape
>> doesn't even really localize---input is a bitch as we all know---it
>> just changes fonts).  Even the last couple of Arena-I18N versions
>> (well that was 6 months ago, actually) did it this way....

Yes that's how I understand it too.

>> The problem is not primarily on the server side, except in generating
>> translations of content (preparing class notes in two languages does
>> make it suck to be me sometimes), it's on the browser side.  

Yep; servers per se are unaware of content.

>>     Jim> Unicode will, of course, fix all this.
>> 
>> Uh-huh.  This is Heaven's Preordained Course (YOW! unified OUTput AND
>> inPUT METH'uds), but....

Now, now. Any suggestions of BETTER ways of combining Japanese with
languages like French or Swedish?

>>  And they of course blame "the Japanese" who oppose
>> "the whole Unicode idea" for political reasons....  For goodness's
>> sake, you can't even get Greek with your Scandinavian in 8 bits.

Roll on UTF. At least I am spared the grizzles of people trying to combine
Norwegian with Greek, whereas I do hear from people trying to combine
things with Japanese.

>> Anyway, we'll see.  But as somebody pointed out, despite the alleged
>> "support" for Unicode in Java (MS's Java interpreter evidently swabs
>> internally, which is OK, but saves files in wrong-endian format, which
>> is evil) and Windows NT (why are there national versions?  why aren't
>> the help files in Unicode?), where are the fonts and applications?  If
>> you don't have 'em, Jim, who would?

Well, I'm sorry to say that I think NT users are likely to see Unicode a
lot sooner than those of us using Unix variants. I could be wrong, and
"uterm" might be just around the corner, but.....

Jim

-- 
Jim Breen                            Department of Digital Systems
Email: j.breen@example.com                 Monash University
http://www.dgs.monash.edu.au/~jwb/      Clayton VIC 3168 Australia
P: +61 3 9905 3298 F: 9905 3574  $@%8%`!&%V%j!<%s(J@$@%b%J%7%eBg3X(J
Next TLUG meeting is Saturday October 11, 1997
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