Microsoft's Windows code pages started out essentially with what is
now 8895-1, then the desktop publishing symbols got added to create
what is now 1252, making it a clean superset of 8859-1. Lately the
Euro has also been added into one of the few empty slots in 1252.
In trying to repeat the 'clean superset' approach to the rest of the
8859 series, MS discovered that too many applications already on the market
relied on the location of such symbols as the paragraph mark (aka pilcrow
sign), copyright symbol etc.
The problem was compounded by the fact that people in other market
areas expected to be able to run non-localized software without ill
effects. This very real problem, and not the desire to be different,
caused MS to create the 125x series which corresponds to the 8859
series in content (always a superset), but not in layout.
Except for 8859-1 <--> 1252 one therefore does need conversion tables.
It is possible to construct the needed tables from the mappings
published on the Unicode ftp site: ftp.unicode.org by linking
each character in the ISO 8859 mappings to a corresponding character
in the Microsoft code page mappings via their common Unicode equivalent.
A./
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:20:40 EDT