Character Representation

Abstract

This paper describes ISO standard character sets currently in use, the use of SGML entity sets, and the TEI writing system declaration.

Harry Gaylord is a senior lecturer in the Department of Humanities Computing at Groningen University, Groningen, The Netherlands. He is Chair of the SC 18 committee of the Dutch Standards Institute (NNI), and member of ISO SC 2 (Coded Character Sets) and ISO SC 18/WG8 (Document Processing and Related Communication). He is the author of TEI TR1 W4 Character Entities and Public Entity Sets and co-author with John Esling of “Computer Codes for Phonetic Symbols”.Journal of the International Phonetic Association (1993), 23,2,85–97.

The Chair of our technical committee submitted a draft of this article. Comments were received from David Birnbaum, Bert Bos, Steve De Rose, Berend Dijk, and Michael Sperberg-McQueen for which we thank them. The committee made revisions before submitting the final version to the editors of this issue of CHUM. In recognition of longstanding contributions to our work, the committee has elected the above mentioned contributors as honourable members, which increases our numbers five-fold. We also wish to thank the secretary general of ISO, L.D. Eicher, for permission to publish portions of the ISO standards and Jan van den Beld, secretary general of ECMA, for furnishing a complete copy of its official register of all known character sets and current versions of the ECMA standards. We also thank Edwin Smura, registrar of AFII, for supplying a copy of much of their font registry.