
file that contains French and Thai, for example. The encoding that supports French
accented letters does not support Thai characters, and vice versa.
Some ISO-8859 encodings and their Windows counterparts have been designed to
cover a large set of languages. This especially applies to ISO-8859-1 and windows-1252.
Such coverage is possible due to the fact that many European languages use just the
basic Latin letters with a small collection of additional letters.
Sources of Information
The following web sites contain useful information on character codes. This means
code tables, conversion tables, prose descriptions, usage guidelines, etc.
Czyborra’s site (http://czyborra.com)
A widely known site, which contains good concise descriptions and comments. It
is rather old, though, and has not been updated for years.
Fileformat.info on charsets (http://www.fileformat.info/info/charset/)
This part of the Fileformat.info site contains character tables (“grids”) for different
encodings, tabular material.
Tex Texin’s material (http://www.i18nguy.com/unicode/codepages.html)
“Character Sets And Code Pages At The Push Of A Button.” This might be called
a real portal to detailed information on encodings.
Exercises
If possible, carry out the following exercises. If the book has been successful in ex-
plaining things, each exercise should take just about 10 to 15 minutes and give you
some self-confidence and practice. ...