Ian Piumarta <ian.piumarta at inria.fr> wrote:
	Latin-1 support(s) at least:  French, Spanish, Catalan, Basque,
	Portuguese, Italian, Albanian, Rhaeto-Romanic, Dutch, German,
	Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, Faroese, Icelandic, Irish,
	Scottish, English, Afrikaans and Swahili (and hence the entire
	American continent, Australia, much of Africa and almost all of
	continental Europe [plus that miserable little island off the
	coast of France, which can't make up its mind about whether it
	wants to be part of Europe or part of the USA] ;).
	
Latin-1 can only be said to support Australia if you discount the
Australian languages, many of whose scripts include less familiar but
still technically "roman" letters like eng.  I know, I know, it's a
quibble.  It certainly doesn't support New Zealand.  There are two
official languages in New Zealand.  This University has recently approved
(as an experiment) a policy where students may write their examination
answers in the other official language (except, obviously, for papers
about other languages).  And M&amacr;ori needs vowels with macron accents.

Mind you, MacRoman doesn't support New Zealand or Australia either,
and never has.

	If we moved to unmodified Latin-1 fonts (and Latin-1 interpretation of the
	encodings > 127) within the image, we'd have:
	
				encoding
	  platform	internal	external	conversion
	  --------	--------	--------	----------
	  Mac Classic	ISO-8859-1	MacRoman	table lookup
	  MacOSX	ISO-8859-1	Unicode		trivial
	  Unix		ISO-8859-1	ISO-8859-1	none (<grin> ;)
	  Win32		ISO-8859-1	no idea		idem
	
One problem with moving to ISO-8859-1 is that you lose several pleasant
characters that are useful for writing English, notably left and right
single and double quotation marks and a couple of dashes.

This is why the usual Windows character set these days is ISO 8859-1
PLUS a block of extra characters in codes 128..159.

If the fonts supported ISO 8859-1 PLUS the Windows characters, then
- Windows data would actually be displayable, which it WON'T if you
  stick to ISO 8859-1 only;
- several more MacRoman characters will have code points they can be
  mapped to, so while some MacOS data won't be displayable, more of it
  will be if you stick to ISO 8859-1 only;
- some of the Unicode characters above 255 that are needed for the old
  MacRoman characters will be displayable; not all, but some;
- UNIX data including only ISO-8859-1 characters will be in no way harmed.

It *really* annoys me to recommend anything associated with Microsoft to
anyone at any time for any reason, but sometimes you just have to face the
facts, and the Microsoft additions to 8859-1 are genuinely useful.