I recall reading a EC/EU document a few years back that stated that all
text software used within European organizations must be able to
produce documention covering all European member languages and all
possible future member languages simultaneously by a certain date.
Does anybody recall this requirement and know where to find it? It also
mentioned that every nation needs to respect any language spoken within
the Union and must be able to produce the content of any official
document in any of these languages.
I am constantly dealing with clients who think Western 1252 is enough
because that is only where they want to market their software. A legal
issue like this would be perfect. Maltese and a few missing characters
here and there do not create sufficient pressure. As long as MS and IBM
don't get sued by the EC because of missing characters it is a moot
argument for most companies. I already use the Chinese ruling in favor
of Unicode successfully for the Asian market, though.
Dave
--- Marco Cimarosti <marco.cimarosti@essetre.it> wrote:
> Otto Stolz wrote:
> > ISO 8859-1 lacks the Euro currency symbol (U+20AC), needed all over
> > Europe (this currency is legal tender in 15 European countries:
> > cf. <http://www.euro.ecb.int/> plus the Republic of San Marino,
> > the Vatican City and the Principality of Monaco). [...]
>
> And Andorra.
>
> But also countries which did not adopt the euro probably need the
> symbol.
> E.g., UK, Switzerland, Denmark. etc.
>
> > ISO 8859-1 lacks the oe-ligature for French(!), [...]
>
> And the capital form of "ÿ", which is however very rare in French.
>
> > and some characters for Sami (IIRC), a minority language spoken
> > in Finland.
>
> And some rare characters for Finnish itself: "č", "š", and "ž".
>
> > Btw., German law entitles every natural person to demand his/her
> > name to be spelled correctly [...]
>
> Talking about Germany, ISO 8859-1 lacks some characters for Turkish,
> the 2nd
> most spoken language in the country.
>
> _ Marco
>
=====
Dave Possin
Globalization Consultant
www.Welocalize.com
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/locales/
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