DOS ain't dead - DOS internationalization support

DOS internationalization support (Developers)

posted by Rugxulo , Usono, 27.11.2012, 07:55

Don't mess with keyboard at all. Rely on native KEYB (or suitable free/libre replacement, e.g. FD KEYB, if needed).

The glyphs from code pages (more or less) corresponding to ISO 8859 can be re-used, covering a large batch of European languages.

For mapping tables, any number of resources supply them, e.g. GNU Emacs (em2303[bs].zip) or Mined sources or iconv (licv112[bs].zip).

"The UCS characters U+0000 to U+007F are identical to those in US-ASCII (ISO 646 IRV) and the range U+0000 to U+00FF is identical to ISO 8859-1 (Latin-1)." (source; i.e., same "code points", different encoding)

cp850 - MS-DOS Codepage 850 (Multilingual Latin 1)
cp852 - MS-DOS Codepage 852 (Multilingual Latin 2)
cp853 - MS-DOS Codepage 853 (Multilingual Latin 3; not in MS-DOS, probably should say IBM OS/2 ??)

iso8859.1 - ISOIEC 8859-1:1998 Latin Alphabet No. 1
iso8859.2 - ISOIEC 8859-2:1999 Latin Alphabet No. 2
iso8859.3 - ISOIEC 8859-3:1999 Latin Alphabet No. 3
iso8859.4 - ISOIEC 8859-4:1998 Latin Alphabet No. 4

Kosta Kostis also has various freeware (fonts, converters, TSRs), esp. isocp101.zip, which include ISOLATIN.CPI, which has cp819 ("true" Latin-1), cp912, cp913 (undocumented in DR-DOS 7.03; Windows calls this cp28593), cp914, etc. As mentioned, FreeDOS does not natively (yet) support these, only the weird variants (same glyphs, different encodings), e.g. cp853 has box chars and same language support as cp913 but text needs manual translation between them.

See Dos2Unix or Mined (or old patch here) for querying the code page correctly between MS-DOS, DR-DOS, and FreeDOS. (Basically, try int 21h 440Ch 6Ah first [MS-DOS, DR-DOS], and if it fails [FreeDOS!], try undocumented int 2Fh, 0AD02h [MS-DOS, FreeDOS].)

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Complete thread:

DOS internationalization support - mbbrutman, 25.11.2012, 01:06 (Developers)
- DOS internationalization support - Rugxulo, 25.11.2012, 04:19
  - DOS internationalization support - mbbrutman, 25.11.2012, 19:52
- DOS internationalization support - marcov, 25.11.2012, 13:15
  - DOS internationalization support - mbbrutman, 25.11.2012, 20:05
    - DOS internationalization support - Rugxulo, 27.11.2012, 07:55
  - DOS internationalization support - marcov, 27.11.2012, 09:35
- DOS internationalization support - Laaca, 25.11.2012, 14:41