Re: windows-1251 language environment

[Anton Zinoviev <anton@lml.bas.bg>]

On 12.X.2003 at 16:45 Dave Love wrote:
> 
> > CP1251 is not similar to the others CP???? coding systems because it
> > is used extensively for several languages in the GNU systems.
> 
> I don't understand this. 

What is the difference between CP1251 and some ISO 8859 coding system?
The only difference that I can see is the name.

> As far as I know, the only significant difference between that and
> the other 125N charsets is that 1251 is used by the two GNU locales.
> Presumably the others are widely used for the languages they
> support.

I'am pretty sure that the other 125N coding systems are not as widely
used in GNU systems as 1251 is.  The other 125N coding systems have
corresponding ISO 8859.  You don't have to use CP1252 because you can
use ISO 8859-1.  The correspondence between CP1250 and ISO8859-2 is
not as close, but again -- if your encoding is ISO8859-2 you can read
text coded with CP1250.  However if you have text coded with CP1251
then you want be able to read anything unless your system uses exactly
CP1251.  Thats one reason why CP1251 became standard for the
Belarusian and Bulgarian Glibc locales and thats why there are some
GNU/Linux distributions that make CP1251 standard also for Russian and
Ukrainian.  Another reason is that among plenty of Cyrillic coding
systems CP1251 is the only that supports all Cyrillic Slavic
languages.  It supports also several non-slavic Cyrillic languages.

It is interesting to know which CP125N encodings XFree86 supports.
That are CP1251, CP1255 and CP1256.  The first is Cyrillic, the second
is Hebrew and the third is Arabic.  This is another demonstration of
the problems that non-Latin users have.

Anton Zinoviev