RFC 1815 (rfc1815) - Page 1 of 6

Character Sets ISO-10646 and ISO-10646-J-1

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Network Working Group                                            M. Ohta
Request For Comments: 1815                 Tokyo Institute of Technology
Category: Informational                                        July 1995


               Character Sets ISO-10646 and ISO-10646-J-1

Status of this Memo

   This memo provides information for the Internet community.  This memo
   does not specify an Internet standard of any kind.  Distribution of
   this memo is unlimited.

Abstract

   Though the ISO character set standard of ISO 10646 is specified
   reasonably well about European characters, it is not so useful in an
   fully internationalized environment.

   For the practical use of ISO 10646, a lot of external profiling such
   as restriction of characters, restriction of combination of
   characters and addition of language information is necessary.

   This memo provides information on such profiling, along with charset
   names to each profiled instance.

   Though all the effort is done to make the resulting charset as useful
   10646 based charset as possible, the result is not so good.  So, the
   charsets defined in this memo are only for reference purpose and its
   use for practical purpose is strongly discouraged.

Introduction

   This memo describes two text encoding schemes based on ISO 10646
   [10646].

   As ISO 10646 specifies too little about how text is visualized, to
   practically use ISO 10646, it is necessary to restrict the standard
   minimally and then add some amount of profiling information.

   For ISO 2022 [ISO2022] based national standards, sufficient profiling
   information is provided by national standardization bodies, but, for
   ISO 10646, such a profiling is not yet provided.

   As the profiling of ISO 10646 largely affects which character or
   combination of characters could be properly displayed, changes of
   profiling of ISO 10646 are as significant as additions of new
   character sets of ISO 2022.



M. Ohta                      Informational
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