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  • Encodings (was: Re: GNU)

    From Nuno Silva@3:633/10 to All on Thursday, March 12, 2026 10:36:42
    On 2026-03-12, Lawrence D?Oliveiro wrote:

    On 12 Mar 2026 02:49:19 GMT, Robert Riches wrote:

    The thread started with somebody complaining that ASCII did not
    provide for the decorative marks some non-English languages from
    Europe put on top of some letters.

    That?s why we had all those national standard character sets. Like the
    ISO Latin-x sets, which kept a common ASCII-like core, for writing

    Not merely ASCII-like, at least the ISO 8859 charsets I've dealt with
    keep ASCII in its entirety?

    systems which used some variant of the Roman alphabet. And then others
    beyond that, for completely non-Roman writing systems, and then into double-byte character sets for the East Asian writing systems.

    And the 7-bit ones which were not ASCII-compatible. Unicode is numbered
    10646 for some reason.

    All now subsumed into Unicode, of course. And all now enjoying
    common frills, like the ever-increasing set of emojis that the
    young ?uns like so much ...

    [square box removed as it seems to somehow be regarded as single-width
    by part of the software stack here]

    Meanwhile, I think it took too long to include copyleft in UCS, and a
    few days ago I checked and there was no "power off" symbol. There is
    "power symbol", standby, and power on, but no power off?

    (And I should thank the UCS for having allowed the inclusion of NO ONE
    UNDER EIGHTEEN with a very poor graphical representation in the proposal document, which surely had some influence in the current existence of
    fonts where the symbol basically says "no eighteen"...)

    --
    Nuno Silva

    --- PyGate Linux v1.5.12
    * Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)