Re: [Groff] character set names

[Bruno Haible]

Tadziu Hoffmann wrote:
> 
> >   - There is no such encoding 'Latin-1'. It is called 'Latin1' or 
> > 'ISO-8859-1';
> >     see the IANA registry of character sets:
> >     http://www.iana.org/assignments/character-sets
> 
> ... the document you cite is either incomplete or inconsistent.

It is the standard document; implementations of charset converters take
their info from there. Therefore it is complete by definition.

> For example, "ISO_8859-1:1987" has an alias "latin1" (lowercase "L"!),
> whereas "ISO-8859-15" has an alias "Latin-9" (with hyphen).

Yes. You can say it's inconsistent. That's life.

> Anyhow, the "Latin alphabet No. 1" defined by "ISO/IEC 8859-1"
> is often called "Latin-1" or "Latin 1" for short (but the term
> is probably inofficial)

These terms are not only inofficial, they also not guaranteed to work in
practice:

  $ iconv -t "Latin-1"
  iconv: conversion to `Latin-1' is not supported
  $ iconv --version
  iconv (GNU libc) 2.3.6

Bruno