An experiment with phonetic writing

[Jorge_Stolfi]

A possibly relevant anecdote is the reason why the ISO-Latin-1 character set does not include the letter œ/Œ, while it has ç, ñ, å, ø, ß, þ, ý, and æ.  Once I asked a French visiting prof about that, ...

Actually, it seems that the prof was only partly right. Some French historian (lalamo tells me) found that the real reason why the French representative convinced the ISO committee to exclude œ from Latin-1 was that he was an employee of French computer manufacturer Bull, and they did not want œ to be included in the character set because their printers did not have that character.

After ten years and national outrage by the French, ISO finally created a standard ISO-8859-15 (ISO Latin-9) which included œ, €, and another 6 characters, but removed eight -- including "¤" and "¦", which I have used many times, for various purposes.  Ugh.  Fortunately we now have Unicode...

"The best thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from."

All the best, --stolfi