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A Short Remark about Character Encoding
The international character of Math-Net requires that this concept should
allow for Math-Net Pages to be displayed in different alphabets.
Worldwide various character encodings are in use, e.g.
- Latin-1 (for West-European characters),
- KOI8-R (for cyrillic characters,
- gb2312 (for chinese characters), ....
Unicode is a character set which covers most other character encodings.
More precisely, there are one-to-one mappings between Unicode characters and
characters in another encoding. It is always possible to encode an
information in Unicode. Hence, the use of Unicode would avoid the problem with different
character sets. Unicode has several formats, e.g. UTF-8 or UTF-16.
For detailed information about Unicode we refer to
the Web site of the Unicode Consortium.
But for the time being, most of the institutions provide Web Pages with
local encodings. The use of Unicode (e.g. in the UTF-8 format) may be a handicap
for the acceptance of a html-page. Hence the option "as is" for the character encoding
is the default value of the Math-Net Page Maker. Alternatively, the Math-Net Page Maker
provides the opportunity to create Math-Net Pages in UTF-8.
Remark for the reader interested in technical details: Unicode is used
in Math-Net Services. The Math-Net Navigator, a portal to and a
service about the Math-Net Pages, converts the metadata of the Math-Net Pages
to Unicode UTF-8 during the postprocessing. So it is possible to process Math-Net Pages
given in any character encoding.
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