Date: Wed, 18 Sep 1991 20:14:12 EDT
From: Christine M Gianone <cmg@watsun.cc.columbia.edu>
Subject: Character Set Files and Utilities
Keywords: Character Set Files and Utilities, PostScript, Cyrillic

A new directory has been set up on watsun only: kermit/charsets.  The files
in this directory are not part of the normal Kermit distribution, and they do
not follow the normal naming conventions.  But they should prove useful to
Kermit users who want to use or learn about text files containing national
and international characters.

Included in the kermit/charsets directory are character set tables for many
character sets, which include the character names, values in decimal, octal,
hex, and row/column notation, and the 8-bit character values themselves.
Most of these tables (e.g. cp437.txt, cp850.txt, latin1.txt, next.txt, etc)
were produced by C programs (cp437.c, cp850.c, etc), so if you can't transfer
the 8-bit text successfully, get the corresponding C program, compile it, and
run it to recreate the character set table.

Also included is a program, textps, for converting plain text containing
8-bit characters to PostScript.  The original file can be in any of several
character sets including Latin-1, various IBM code pages, Apple QuickDraw,
NeXT, DEC MCS, etc.  You can use this program on any UNIX system, MS-DOS,
VAX/VMS, and any other computer that has a C compiler and supports the idea
of standard input and output redirection.  Thanks to Frank da Cruz for the
character set programs, tables, and the textps program.

Finally, the files cp866.doc and cp866.uue contain a Cyrillic code page
(real Cyrillic characters) you can use on your PC if it has an EGA or higher
and DOS 3.30 or higher.  This was contributed by Dimitri Vulis of the City
University of New York.  cp866.doc tells how to install the code page.

Once your Cyrillic code page is installed, you can display cp866.txt (the
Cyrillic code page table) on your screen locally from DOS, you can use DOS
applications to create and view Cyrillic files, etc.  MS-DOS Kermit 3.10 and
later supports CP866 as a file transfer character set, and you can also use
your Cyrillic code page during during terminal emulation with any of three
commonly used Cyrillic host character sets: ISO 8859-5, KOI-8, or Short KOI.
Kermit initialization files, from Konstantin Vinogradov of the International
Centre for Scientific and Technical Information in Moscow, are provided for
this purpose in the files kermit/charsets/*.ini.

The organization and naming of the files in this area is subject to change.
Meanwhile, additional contributions to this collection of character set
tables and utilities are most welcome.