----- Original Message -----
From: Tatsuo Ishii <t-ishii@sra.co.jp>
Sent: Saturday, August 18, 2001 10:02 PM
> ALT -> IBM866
Just a quick comment: ALT is not necessarily IBM866.
It can be any US-ASCII or 26-character-alphabet Latin set, for example
IBM819 or ISO8859-1. Is actually quite different from IBM866 in its
true meaning, and they shouldn't be aliased together. ALT is used for example,
when none of KOI8-R, Windows-1251, or IBM866 are available to a Russian-speaking
person to read/write any text, messages and stuff, we use simple English letters
to write words in Russian so that pronunciation sort of holds the same. It's
something like russian_latin (as an equivalent to greek_latin in the
http://www.iana.org/assignments/character-sets spec), and the writing this
way reminds Polish or Serbian-Latin a bit.
Serguei
