
===========================================================================
Character Encoding Description File Format               file: format
===========================================================================

The format for the character encoding description lines is the following:

Four comment lines. They should not be longer than 69 characters.

===========================================================================

The first line is the Character Encoding Name.

Example:

ISO 8859-1 (Latin Alphabet No. 1)

===========================================================================

The 2nd, 3rd and 4th lines are for version and contributor information.

Example:

V1.01 by Kosta Kostis <kostis@acm.org>
Source: EMCA-94
ISO 2022 Sequence: <ESC>(B<ESC>-A

===========================================================================

The rest is a list of:

<CHAR_NUM><TAB><COMMENT_CHARS><TAB><ISO_NAME>

where

	<CHAR_NUM>	is the *hex* two digit code number ("%02X")
 			exception: file iso10646 has four digits ("%04X")
	<TAB>		is the <HT> control character (ASCII: 9)
	<COMMENT_CHARS>	is a comment character string
	<ISO_NAME>	is the ISO 10646 name for the character

===========================================================================

Usually each line will be separated by a "\n" (LINE FEED) or "\r\n"
(CARRIAGE RETURN and LINE FEED) depending on how your OS / editor /
C runtime library stores plain text files.

Use the description file "template" for creating other ASCII based 8-bit
character encodings than those already supplied.

===========================================================================

Note:

	To ensure maximum "fault tolerance" and minimum error, transtab
	does a little more than simply comparing two ISO 10646 names.

	1. transtab reads one ISO 10646 name into a string.
	2. transtab converts the string to upper case.
	3. If there is a LEFT PARENTHESIS "(" in the string, it deletes
	   everything after and including it (optional comment string).
	4. transtab deletes trailing white space.

	The resulting string is stored in tables used for the creation
	of the conversion tables.

The use of comment strings and mixed case is not recommended.
See Function ReadCodeTable() in the files "readtab.*" for more details.
It should be fairly easy to use this function in other programs.
