Sortemic Text Encoding

Abstract

Introduction: In a recent Computer column I deplored the continuing use in the telecommunications and computing industry of the ASCII and EBCDIC character sets, and condemned the incipient use of the Unicode scheme for text encoding, suggesting that something simpler was required to support, for example, simple interlingual text equipment applied to tasks such as e-mail. In the following I describe and advocate a basis for uniform text encoding systems, and possibly only one is needed, which will support digital use of all the world's writing systems both for encoding of text by people, and for practical digital interlingual storage and exchange of text, such as is sorely needed for Internet.