Subject: Re: EACC (NC Z 39.64) to BIG5 converter

From: Yolin H u a n g <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 11 Feb 1993 21:48:34 EST

{ I am looking for a utitlity that will map the three-byte code used by
{ libraries (EACC or NC standard Z 39.64) to BIG5.  Any platform--unix,
{ mac, or pc--is fine.

  I was going to say, cjkxref.fix is definitely a better place to start.
And there are excellent programmers around.  But, since most CCNet people
don't have access to EACC database (?), and therefore won't find the
need, and won't spend their time and headache over it.

  Now, here is (first) an evangelium (kind of): the Bell Lab "Plan 9"
action team has just announced an utility (see below) to map between
several different code sets around their UTF code (which seems to be a
derivative/ variant of the Unicode).  So that, the AT&T's lead in the
world multi-lingual computer market is secured.  However, their
understanding of Big5 seems to have come from the cxterm, and haven't got
it right yet (all the codings are such a blackbox; can't really blame
ZYG).  Looks like, the correction will take a while to reach there.
  This seems to be byfar the most versatile mapping utility.  If all
major EACC-users, schools, organizations inundate them with ernest-worded
petitions with authoritative underwritings, they might turn their head
and add EACC into this utility, and it will become the most versatile yet.

  Then, the bad news is that, I can't still make this piece to work
right; either it's still too buggy, or I was too dizzy at the moment.

  But, cjkxref.fix is still the better.  Maybe several major schools can
put together a project, and get funding to work on a good mapping utility,
carousel around all the codes covered in cjkxref.fix table; can learn
from good graphic format converters, such as imtools; suppose there is
this code mapping tool cmt, such that

        cmt -in eacc -out b5 < text.eacc > text.b5

And cmt -h will give all the formats it can handle.

  Maybe the National Endowment for the Arts will consider this to worth
more than bizarre picture shows ...

------------------------------------------------------------

From: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 9 Feb 93 01:06 EST

        The Plan 9 utility for translating between character sets
is now available by anonymous ftp from research.att.com in the
file dist/tcs.shar.Z. It requires ANSI/ISO C and comes with some
regression tests and a manual page. it understands the following
character sets (output from tcs -lv):
        utf     UTF encoding from XOPEN
        utf1    UTF encoding from 10646
        ascii   7-bit ASCII
        8859-1  Latin-1 (Western and Northern Europe, including German and Itali
an)
        latin1  ISO 8859-1
        8859-2  Latin-2 (Eastern Europe except Turkey and the Baltic countries)
        8859-3  Latin-3 (The Mediterranean Area and South Africa; obsolete)
        8859-4  Latin-4 (Scandinavia and the Baltic countries; obsolete)
        8859-5  Part 5 (Cyrillic)
        8859-6  Part 6 (Arabic)
        8859-7  Part 7 (Greek)
        8859-8  Part 8 (Hebrew)
        8859-9  Latin-5 (Turkey, Western Europe including Scandinavia)
        kio8    KIO-8 (recommended)
        kio8x   KIO-8 (alternate)
        cyr1    mystery DOS Cyrillic encoding
        jis     XJIS
        big5    Big 5 (HKU)
        gb      GB2312-80
        unicode Unicode 1.0

share and enjoy.

                        andrew hume