Googling turns up the fact that the fundamental paper by René Haentjens, "Ordering universal character strings", is available at
http://www.hpl.hp.com/hpjournal/dtj/vol5num3/vol5num3art4.txt Tony H was right to mention the work of the National Language Technical Center at IBM's Toronto Laboratory. (It is|was actually in North York, Ontario, a Toronto suburb.) I cherish my copies of its multivolume National Language Design Guide, and anyone who can find copies of them on the net should download them. Why the NLTC was killed off, notionally by IBM Canada, is unlikely ever to be fully understood. No one outside IBM is in any position to speculate about such things, and those inside it all have their own organizational political imperatives to defend. What is clear in the record is that it was a centre of excellence. Nowhere else, for example, have I seen other cogent treatments of the problems of treating cyrillic text embedded in roman text, roman text embedded ir arabic text, and the like. John Gilmore, Ashland, MA 01721 - USA
