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Re: Weird 8859-1 charset



On Sun 09 Aug 2026 at 17:31:07 +0700, Robert Elz wrote:
> In that we see (inter alia):
> 
> 	ALPHA		0x40 - 0x56 0x58 - 0x76 0x78 - 0x7f
> 	LOWER		0x60 - 0x76 0x78 - 0x7f
> 	PUNCT		0x21 - 0x3f 0x57 0x77
> 	UPPER		0x40 - 0x56 0x58 - 0x5f
> 
> What's with the Ws ???   (0x57 and 0x77)
> 
> As best I can tell, 0x57 is 'W' and 0x77 is 'w' in Latin-1
> (aka 8859-1) despite the original (ancient) Latin not having a 'W'
> character.   If those code points truly are punctuation, used for
> what?   The W's are also issing from the TOUPPER and TOLOWER mappings.

ALPHA is also missing the letters at codepoints above 0x80, which makes
the file extra wrong. "en_US.ISO_8859-1.src" looks in much better shape.

> First, the Latin-1 file also contains:
> 
> 	CHARSET		",A"
> 
> which a comment suggests is used after an ESC.   Used for what?
> Anything that matters?   Who or what assigned the ",A" ?

My guess would be it would be to select that charset to be used in some
terminal or other. I searched in the xterm (mostly DEC) escape sequences
but didn't find anthing like that, but it can also mean I didn't search
for the right thing. It could also be in X11's weird Compound Text
Encoding but it doesn't seem like that either.

-Olaf.
-- 
___ Olaf 'Rhialto' Seibert                            <rhialto/at/falu.nl>
\X/ There is no AI. There is just someone else's work.           --I. Rose

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