SV: Re: SV: Re: Coding of national characters?

[<lars.gu.johansson@xxxxxxxxx>]

<pgut001@cs.auckland.ac.nz> wrote:
>
> The (rather complex) issues surrounding this are explained in the 
X.509 style
> guide (with some recent updates to cover character set issues), 
available from
> http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/x509guide.txt.  Apologies to 
people who
> already know about the guide, but these sorts of questions seem to come up a
> fair bit so I've cc'd the message back to the list in case anyone else wants
> to know how to handle character set issues.
>
> I've also written some code which should be able to take virtually any input
> text and convert it to an X.509-kosher form, if anyone wants to test this
> (especially with multibyte and widechar character sets) please let me know -
> I've only really got access to ASCII and 8859-1 environments so some of the
> stuff is guesswork.

Thanx Peter,

your guide is very helpful. I was already aware of it but I've noticed that
it's been updated since the last time I went through it.

However, it's still NOT a solution to the problem (unless of course your
guide is incorporated into the standard ;-)

Can we please have this fixed in PKIX-1?

BMPString sounds like a much better alternative than teletexString so one
possibility would be to change the definition to:

DirectoryString ::= CHOICE {
    printableString         PrintableString (SIZE (1..maxSize)),  --if 
it's sufficient otherwise...
    bmpString                  BMPString (SIZE (1..maxSize)),         
--if it's sufficient otherwise...
    universalString         UniversalString (SIZE (1..maxSize)) --otherwise
    }

Nevertheless, ISO 8859-1 is a lot better solution than BMPString
for most european languages in terms of efficiency.

So what's the tag 'visibleString' from the SET definition? Is that ISO 8859-1?
In that case, can we use it?

Do I sound desperate?

/Lars Johansson