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Date:      Wed, 22 Apr 1998 08:28:20 -0400
From:      "Kaleb S. KEITHLEY" <k.#nojunk#keithley@opengroup.org>
To:        freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
Cc:        hafner@informatik.tu-muenchen.de, freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Euro key ?
Message-ID:  <353DE264.2F1CF0FB@opengroup.org>
References:  <9804221332.aa28327@s3.synx.com>

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remy@synx.com wrote:
> On 22 Apr, Soren Schmidt wrote:
> > In reply to Walter Hafner who wrote:
> >> The symbol for the Euro...
> >
> > Yeah but where is it in the iso8859-1 page ??
>
> No hurry. Let's wait to see what funny code the Wxx will return, put it
> on keyboard mapping, and let European users fontedit the X fonts to have
> things match.

Editing ISO8859-x fonts is far from the right thing to do.

Making X display the Euro glyph is easy, but there are larger problems
than X. 

For example, if you fontedit your ISO8859-x fonts to change the currency
glyph (code point 0xa4) to the Euro glyph, that'll make it possible for
things to look nice on your screen, but then you're not going to get the
same thing on a piece of paper when you print that file.

ISO needs to do two things. First they need to define an ISO2022 escape
sequence that you can use switch to a codeset that defines the Euro.
Second, they need to define that new codeset that contains the Euro, and
all the other miscellaneous currency characters, e.g. that are defined
in Unicode/ISO10646 but not in any other character set. (Perhaps they've
already done this?)

I already have a query in to ISO about those two things. Whether they
can act quickly enough to produce something usable is a different
question. Perhaps I presume too much when I think that there's a risk
that they'll come back and say "it's in Unicode, use Unicode." Is
everyone ready to switch en mass to Unicode? 

In the mean time the X11 specifications and the Sample Implementation
are being augmented with new keysyms, one or more new fonts, and a
non-standard escape sequence to switch between codesets. Once ISO
defines a standard escape sequence then the SI will be changed
accordingly.

(Now the rest of the world gets to learn how to deal with codeset
switching, which the Japanese have been doing for years. All thanks to
the Euro. :-)

--

Kaleb S. KEITHLEY
X Architect, The Open Group X Project Team

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