Conference turris::scandia

    Spelling is definitely "Sundsvall."  It's a town in north central
    Sweden, on the Baltic (east) coast. 
    

    The scandinavian countries (probably others too) have their own
    character set (7-bit). The norwegian one is based on the ASCII table
    but have modified it to include the norwegian characters � � �.
    This means that 6 characters in the ASCII table are not included
    in the 7-bit norwegian character set. The characters are:
    
    [ - �
    { - �
    \ - �
    | - �
    ] - �
    } - �
    
    So what the customer probably meant was, does this product support
    7-bit national character sets. If you have a VT200 manual (the small
    booklet) you'll find there all the national character sets that the
    VT200 supports.
          
    Hope this helps,
    
    				Terje

From about the VT200 series onward, Dec terminals have supported European
7-bit "National Replacement Character Sets" that, as Terje pointed out,
display $#@[\]^`{}|~ (I think that's all) in some locally-specified variant.
Not all countries change all characters.  For example, the UK only changes
# (to pound-sterling).

Also, most, if not all, of our serial line printers (such as the LA50)
support the same character sets.

The VT200 and VT300 series also support the Dec Multinational character
set, that uses character values between 129 and 255 for the national
letters for manu European languages.  The VT300 series also supports
ISO Latin-1, an extension of Dec Multinational that is the current
standard.

A user's application can select the particular character set needed
by sending an escape sequence.  Also, the VT200 series and, I presume,
the VT300 series allow the terminal user to specify the particular
national character set to use when the terminal is turned on or reset.

Hope this answers your customer's question.  Let me know if I can
help you further.

Martin.

    Not only the VT200/300 series support the National replacement
    character sets but also the VT100! Actually in norway you chose
    between a "norwegian" or "US" VT100. When you pressed {, the terminal
    showed "�".
    
    I think there are a lot of those VT100 around and I guess that's
    why your customer asked. 8-bit characters comes out as a dark spot
    on the VT100.
    
    			Terje

    Just a small comment to those of you that doesn't know anything
    about computers.
    
    7-bit Char. and 8-bit char : What does it mean?
    
    Every character that you type on you terminal is translated so
    that the computer shall be able to read it . (actually it's
    vice versa). Every character is 'built' of 7 or 8 bits. A bit
    is either 1 or zero (or ON/OFF).
    
    7 bit :  100000 = A
    8 bit : 0100000 = A
    
    The 7-bit was the 'old' standard allowing you to have 128 different
    characters.
    
    Then they realized that if every 'normal' alphabeth should have
    all their characters in the ASCII table you'd had to add another
    bit (To the Byte).
    
    Therefore in the modern standard 8 bits are used , leaving space
    for 256 different characters.
    
    If I'm wrong about this please correct me...
    
    Paul.

	Thanks to all the respondents.  We'll use the "v" spelling.

	To clarify my P.S., the customer was not interested in
	our terminal support.  They were interested in our workstations
	and unnounced product XYZ that will implement the X Window System
	from M.I.T.  [OK, now we DECies know what I'm talking about.  
	And we are talking about XYZ to the public even though the
	product is still unnannounced so I think it's OK to talk about
	it here.]

	I know that our workstations support terminal emulation in
	windows, but the point of the XYZ product is that it allows
	for multiple windows.  How would XYZ product be run?  In
	multiple terminal-emulation windows?

	Perhaps this is the wrong place for this question, but the
	readership of this note appears to be technical enough to
	handle it.  

					- Anne Marie	

    I'm not sure I understand what your question has to do with 7-bit
    replacement character sets, but the last time I ran DECwindows (FT2) X
    Windows had no support for national replacement char. sets and neither
    did DECwindows but I seem to remember that the DECwindows terminal
    emulator (DECterm) had or will have. Something might happen with
    DECwindows V1.1 when it comes to internationalization and 7-bit
    replacement char sets. 
    
    So if you want to run your product under DECwindows I think all
    your input/output must come through a DECterm widget.
    
    Then again, I might be wrong. I don't have a workstation anymore
    (and I miss it!) so I can't check it out for you. You might want
    to ask this question in the BULOVA::DECWINDOWS conference.
                          
    				Terry

    I lived in Sundsvall 1967-68 and still correspond regularly with
    friends in that area.  I am not aware that there is a "university"
    in that area, although I think there is an engineering school or
    "technical high school" in the area.
    
    Sundsvall is a lovely city, quite small by American standards.
    

Yes, Sundsvall is a nice town in the summer -- I was there for O-ringen
last July.

But, back to the problem at hand.  I'm running X-windows (version 10)
layered on an Ultrix workstation connected to a VMS system.  It can
display the Latin-1 (8-bit multinational) character set, but it doesn't
handle LK201-compose correctly.  (If I had the sources and an hour,
I could fix this.)

Adding national replacement characters is pretty simple.  It is
reasonable to expect this in terminal emulation products we sell, but
-- as I'm sure Ann-Marie already knows -- you should ask that question of
the product's manager.

Martin.