Messages in this thread | | | Date | Mon, 18 Aug 1997 21:20:43 -0600 (MDT) | From | Teunis Peters <> | Subject | UTF-8, OSTA-UDF [why?], Unicode, and miscellaneous gibberish |
| |
On Tue, 12 Aug 1997, Andrew E. Mileski wrote:
> > > The OSTA-UDF(tm) filesystem I'm working on supports compressed Unicode. > > > Basically, the first byte is a flag inidcating how to expand the following > > > bytes: > > > 8 = high byte is 0 and low byte is from data stream > > > 16 = high byte is followed by low byte in the data stream > > > By the ISO standards, this is CS0 or a character set defined by agreement. > > > > Not yet another Unicode encoding format?! What's wrong with > > UTF-8? Not Invented Here? > > UTF-8 maps Unicode to a font as Unicode does not specify how a character > appears, but rather Unicode differentiates characters from each other.
<pardon delay - was away fer a week... so don't mind if this is the umpteenth answer>
Unicode : A set of encoding standards for storing international characters, yes?
UTF-7 : a 7-bit way of encoding Unicode (and _ONLY_ Unicode) UTF-8 : a 8-bit ... UTF-16: a 16-bit UTF-32: The full Unicode (AFAIK)
There's 64K tables of 64K characters. What's commonly encountered is only one table of Unicode characters (this is NOT UTF-16)
AFAIK only 3 tables have been defined - the basic Unicode set (64K) and two tables for such large symbolic languages as Chinese....
If you want bit encodings for UTF-8 I can provide them (but http://www.unicode.org is a better place to look :)
There is NO font information anywhere in any of this mess.... Just a standard 'this character == this Unicode value'....
Beyond that the Chinese still (AFAIK) decided whether or not to actually USE unicode [the language has other ways of creating new characters - this is not something computers are good at handling], Unicode has largely been accepted [mostly by fiat].
Personally I think Unicode is a really good idea... I like the idea of being able to put descriptive filenames in files. sometimes the native language [eg Japanese] is the only way to describe a file.
Not that it matters but I think as long as filenames from 16bit+ filesystems should be encoded into UTF-8 before being passed to the user.
So what filesystems are dependant on what character set?
FAT : 8-bit IBM-PC VFAT : 16-bit Unicode ext-2 : Latin-1? (though UTF-8 is supported) HPFS : global translation table (8bit -> 16bit Unicode?) NTFS : as HPFS I think
This is all I know of....
Sure would be nice to be able to emulate ioctl's on existing devices BTW - being able to COMPLETELY emulate a console could be valuable <g>.... [I have a graphical console that emulates everything except ioctl's...] (though 'kon' is faster <sigh>)
| |