= Сообщение: 8720 из 12491 ====================================== ENET.SYSOP = От : Ward Dossche 2:292/854 02 Jun 19 22:24:56 Кому : Bj”rn Felten 02 Jun 19 22:24:56 Тема : Re: The secret 'Allow8bit 1' in zone 2 FGHI : area://ENET.SYSOP?msgid=2:292/854+181e1b1c На : area://ENET.SYSOP?msgid=2:203/2+5cf3ad16 = Кодировка сообщения определена как: WINDOWS-1252 =========================== Ответ: area://ENET.SYSOP?msgid=2:203/2+5cf434e8 ============================================================================== BF> *A* MakeNl config? So we are not any more running a simple MakeNl to BF> MakeNl nodelist creation in Z2? There are other ways to produce the BF> result than what the Z2 RCs could expect? And we haven't even been privy BF> to this information, save for a few Dutch sysops?
Here's some information taken from the FIDONEWS-publication. If you have ties to the editor he could point you to follow-up articles dealing with UTF8.
----------------------------------------------------------------- FIDONEWS 32-07 Page 2 16 Feb 2015
================================================================= GENERAL ARTICLES =================================================================
UTF-8 In The Nodelist By Michiel van der Vlist, 2:280/5555
This weekend an initiative was launched in Z2 to break the "ASCII only barrier" for the nodelist. Ever since the first Fidonet nodelist was issued in 1984, the character set for the nodelist has been the ASCII set. The relevant FTSC document, FTS-5000.005.005 says this:
The nodelist is a flat text file containing any number of lines, using only the ASCII (7 bit) character set.
In the early days of Fidonet, this was acceptable when Fidonet was limited to Northern America and there was no other choice anyway because at the time that was the only standardised character set that all Fidonet systems had in common.
But already in 1989 when Fidonet had spread all over the world the ASCII only barrier provoked attempts to break it. In the R22 segment of nodelist.197 of 1989, we find lines like this:
What we see here is an early attempt to accomodate names written with "funny" characters. At the time MakeNl did not allow 8 bit characters, they were replaced by question marks, so if a different character set was used, it had to be a seven bit set. The character set used is ISO 646-FI. In this set the seldom used ASCII characters { \ } { | and } are replaced by the upper and lower case a diaresis, o diaresis and a ring. („ ” †)
My nodelist archive is incomplete, so I was unable to look beyond 2004 In 2004 this was still in use in the Finnish part of the nodelist. It illustrates that there is a demand for the ability to write the sysop's name in his own language in his own alphabet.
Using national characters sets however is impractical to use an understatement. The above method is not suitable for more general use. If all regions or nets started using their own encoding, it would become quit messy.
The latest version of MakeNl allows the use of non-ASCII characters by using the option "Allow8bit 1". Using the 8th bit gives much more freedom than substituting not much used characters by national characters.
An eight bit character set however is not good enough either. Even with the nodelist shrunk to a percentage of what it once was, there is no single eight bit set that covers all of Fidonet. Net even "most FIDONEWS 32-07 Page 3 16 Feb 2015
of Fidonet. Fortunately most modern operating systems now use unicode internally, so dealing with UTF-8 encoding is not all that hard.
In December a test was performed by adding a season's greeting to the prolog of the daily nodelist as distributed in Z2. The encoding was UTF-8 and it covered all the umlauts and accents as used in Western Europe in addition to characters with macrons as used in Eastern Europe as well as Cyrilics as used in Russia, Ukrania and Bulgaria and more. This test was a success in that it broke nothing. Most likely the majority of Fidonet sysops never saw it.
As a follow up ZC2 is now starting to distribute a daily nodelist in UTF-8 format. It is not a replacement of the existing weekly nodelist and nodelist diff, nor does it replace the daily nodelist in ASCII. It is an additional service with a seperate distribution. The name of the file is DAILYUTF.ddd where ddd is the day of the year.
Presently there are contributions in UTF-8 from R28 and R56.
The following paragraph has been coordinated with the ZC2:
RC's wishing to participate in the project are invited to do so. They should:
1) Send a message to the ZC2 to inform him. The ZC2 needs to adjust his configuration to process UTF-8 formatted segments from an RC.
2) Submit segments named UTFRrr.ddd where rr is the region number and ddd is the day of the year of the coming or present Friday or UTFRrr.Cdd where C is the compression and dd are the last two digits of the day of the year of the coming or present Friday.
3) The character encoding for the segment must be UTF-8.
4) Particpating in the project does not relieve RC's of the oubligation to submit REGIONrr segments in ASCII. They must continue to submit those segments in addition to the segments in UTF-8.
Next week: How to create and edit UTF-8 text files.
--- D'Bridge 3.99 * Origin: Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards (2:292/854)
