Character Sets

When we say that Kermit supports a large repertoire of character sets, we're not kidding. C-Kermit (and Kermit 95) know fifty-three different character-sets, and can translate between most any pair of them. Let's see, how may pairs are there? (Remember your combinatorics?)

Kermit stands alone in its ability to handle a wide range of character sets, not only during terminal emulation, but also during text-file transfer. Anybody who has tried to transfer (say) French or German text from (say) a Macintosh to a PC knows why this is important.

C-Kermit understands all major character sets used for West European languages, East European (Roman alphabet) languages, Greek, languages that are written in the Cyrillic alphabet, languages written in the Hebrew alphabet, and (file transfer only, for the present) Japanese Katakana AND Kanji, and now also Unicode, the Universal Character Set. Here's the list:

  Kermit Name         Description                   Type

ascii US ASCII 7 bits british Britain ISO 646 7 bits bulgaria-pc Bulgarian PC code page 8 bits (Cyrillic) canadian-french Canada-French DEC NRC 7 bits cp1250 Windows Code Page 1250 8 bits cp1251 Windows Code Page 1251 8 bits (Cyrillic) cp1252 Windows Code Page 1252 8 bits cp437 PC Code Page 437 8 bits cp850 PC Code Page 850 8 bits cp852 PC Code Page 852 8 bits cp855 PC Code Page 855 8 bits (Cyrillic) cp858 PC Code Page 858 8 bits cp862 PC Code Page 862 8 bits (Hebrew) cp866 PC Code Page 866 8 bits (Cyrillic) cp869 PC Code Page 869 8 bits (Greek) cyrillic-iso ISO 8859-5 Latin/Cyrillic 8 bits (Cyrillic) danish Denmark/Norway ISO 646 7 bits dec-kanji JIS X 0208 Multi7 (Japanese) dec-multinational DEC Multinational 8 bits dg-international Data General International 8 bits dutch Netherlands ISO 646 7 bits elot-927 Greece ELOT 927 7 bits (Greek) elot-928 Greece ELOT 928 8 bits (Greek) euc-jp JIS X 0201 + 0208 Multi8 (Japanese) finnish Finland ISO 646 7 bits french France ISO 646 7 bits german Germany ISO 646 7 bits greek-iso ISO 8859-7 8 bits (Greek) hebrew-7 DEC VT100 Hebrew 7 bits (Hebrew) hebrew-iso ISO 8859-8 Latin/Hebrew 8 bits (Hebrew) hp-roman8 Hewlett Packard Roman-8 8 bits hungarian Hungary ISO 646 7 bits iso2022jp JIS X 0201 + 0208 Multi7 (Japanese) italian Italy ISO 646 7 bits jis7-kanji JIS X 0201 + 0208 Multi7 (Japanese) koi8-cyrillic USSR GOST KOI-8 8 bits (Cyrillic) koi8r Usenet KOI8 extended (Russia) 8 bits (Cyrillic) koi8u Usenet KOI8 extended (Ukrain) 8 bits (Cyrillic) latin1-iso ISO 8859-1 Latin Alphabet 1 8 bits latin2-iso ISO 8859-2 Latin Alphabet 2 8 bits latin9-iso ISO 8859-15 Latin Alphabet 9 8 bits macintosh-latin Apple Quickdraw / Latin-1 8 bits mazovia-pc Polish PC code page 8 bits next-multinational NeXT Multinational 8 bits norwegian Norway/Denmark ISO 646 7 bits portuguese Portugal ISO 646 7 bits shift-jis IBM Code Page 982 Kanji Multi8 (Japanese) short-koi Short KOI Cyrillic 7 bits (Cyrillic) spanish Spain ISO 646 7 bits swedish Sweden ISO 646 7 bits swiss Switzerland DEC NRC 7 bits ucs2 Unicode / ISO 10646 UCS-2 Multi8 (Universal) utf8 Unicode / ISO 10646 UTF-8 Multi8 (Universal)

Character sets / Columbia University / kermit@columbia.edu / 1 Jan 2000