On Mon, Jun 14, 2004 at 08:43:38AM -0700, Elvis Presley wrote: ..[snip]..
> Comparing characters would be easy, they compare as > unsigned integers, but sorting them would be a > problem, because you'd want to group all the > (accented) vowels together, according to language > specific rules. In Greek, this wouldn't be a problem, > because monotonic vowels and polytonic vowels, though > occupying different code ranges, are not mixed in the > same word: they are essentially different languages. A > 'tonos' is not a 'oxia' or a 'varia'. Actually, "tonos" and "oxia" are treated as equivalents in Unicode. Nevertheless, sorting wouldn't be a problem indeed, because it is done according to the base letter only, punctuation is irrelevant. > Why do Greek newspapers still use ISO 8859-7? "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." > nightmare), but if you're only working in Greek, why > not stick with what you know? Exactly. Nothing to do with size issues, and everything to do with that. Plus, a major operating system doesn't really support UTF-8, and instead concentrates on UTF-16, which is unusable in UNIX/GNU systems for most practical purposes. > My Microsoft browser(=IE) has problems with ISO Greek > and Windows Greek, especially capital Alpha with > tonos: it gets confused, and displays a box. Well actually, this particular letter is the only incompatibility between the two character sets. In ISO-8859-7, this letter occupies the code point that MS Word once had hardcoded as representing the paragraph symbol. So for Windows-1253, Microsoft put the paragraph symbol there and moved capital Alpha with tonos elsewhere. -- Vasilis Vasaitis "A man is well or woe as he thinks himself so." -- Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/