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1 INTRODUCTION

Nowadays the computer systems hardware and especially the software are more and more often adjusted to the cultural and language peculiarities of a specific country and nation. In different countries, different alphabets and rules for coding currency units, date, time, numbers, etc. are in use. Sorting algorithms for verbal texts present a special kind of problem. The Estonian language and culture have developed in close contacts with several languages and cultures, so we do not possess unique rules and algorithms to represent the above-mentioned data. Agreements developed in practical life need to be presented in the form of a standard. In most cases, it is possible to lean on international standards, yet they have to be somewhat extended and specified according to the peculiarities of the Estonian language and culture.

The standard presented here includes rules for solving Estonian culture and language related information technology problems in the process of software and hardware products development, especially considering the needs of information exchange between different systems.

The solutions represented in the standard are based on international standards and conform with draft standards in preparation, such as ISO new code tables, the UNIX standard project POSIX, also national language support facilities of the IBM and Microsoft companies. Making the choices standardizing code tables and keyboard layout, international agreements that seemed to be closest to the conditions of Estonia were chosen, making only a minimum of necessary changes. For this reason, the code tables presented in the standard do not include the letter c with caron and cyrillic letters, which have some practical importance for the Estonian cultural environment, yet are not included in the official Estonian alphabet. Letters missing in the standard can be coded using the ISO code table substitution mechanism - the ISO 2022 "Code extension techniques".

Most of the problems to be solved through the standard arose not as much in connection with the establishment of Estonia's sovereignty, but were brought about by the fast development of computers and software technology. In Estonia, coding of the Estonian language alphabet has been on the order of the day for a long time already. The first draft standard was developed in 1990.

The present standard includes solutions based on single-byte codes. The standard does not deal with the character generation mechanisms defined in the standard ISO 6937-2, as the standard is applicable in Estonia without changes. Some problems (especially code table arrangements) can be solved more favourably for Estonia with the transfer to multiple-byte code tables (ISO 10646).

The following normative documents and drafts were taken into account in developing the standard:

  1. ISO 8859-1:1987. Information processing. 8-bit single-byte coded character sets. Part 1: Latin alphabet No. 1.
  2. ISO 6937-2:1983. Information processing. Coded character sets for text communication. Part 2. Latin alphabetic and non-alphabetic graphic characters.
  3. ISO 2022:1986. Information processing. ISO 7-bit and 8-bit coded character sets. Code extension techniques.
  4. ISO 10646. Information technology. Universal Multiple-Octet Coded Character Set (UCS). Part 1: Architecture and Basic Multilingual Plane.
  5. National Language Support Reference Manual. Volume 2. Third Edition. /IBM. National Language Technical Center. - IBM, May 1992.
  6. ENSV VST 582-89 (projekt). Eesti ja vene kooditabelid. 7- ja 8-bitised koodid. (Estonian SSR draft standard: Estonian and Russian code tables. 7- and 8-bit codes.)
  7. ENSV VST 581-89 (projekt). Klaviatuurid (sõrmistikud). (Estonian SSR draft standard: Keyboards.)
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