Multilingual Text Processing in a Two-Byte Code

ABS~ACT National and international standards committees are now discussing a two-byte code for multilingual information processing. This provides for 65,536 separate character and control codes, enough to make permanent code assiguments for all the charanters of ell national alphabets of the world, and also to include Chinese/Japanese characters. This paper discusses the kinds of flexibility required to handle both Roman and non-Roman alp.habets. It is crucial to separate information units (codes) from graphic forms, to maximize processing p ower, Comparing alphabets around the world, we find t.hat the graphic devices (letters, digraphs, accent marks, punctuation, spacing, etc.) represent a very limited number of information units. It is possible to arr_ange alphabet codes to provide transliteration equivalence, the best of three solutions compared as a _eramework for code assignments.