8 - bit characters dear fellow linguists : in the past months i have read several postings to this list using languages other than english ( spanish , german , french , finnish , italian , etc . ) . i consider this situation absolutely delicious , as it adds that international flavour that our discipline is so proud of . as english is not my native tongue , i welcome and exercise my right to use my language in all contexts . however , the notorious difficulty that 8 - bit characters have to travel in the cyberspace has made it really hard to send texts that comply with the spelling conventions of these languages ( basically accented and umlauted vowels , greek letters and certain other symbols ) . this is not a big problem when you are just sending a relatively short e-message to a colleague who speaks the same language ( you just drop the accents and type plain vowels or capitals instead , for enye you type a plain " n " , etc . ) . the real trouble arises when you wish to send a more polished document such as a paper , an abstract , a conference posting , a bibliography , a draft of a thesis to a distant supervisor , etc . in most of these cases the spelling norms * are * crucial . the obvious solution is the coding of 8 - bit characters as sequences of 7 - bit characters . i think that this has become a common practice , but i do n't know whether there is a standard for these conversions . if this coding practice has not yet been the object of standardisation , i venture to propose one below . this proposal refers to the characters available in the extended character set on ibm pc - compatible computers ( i am not familiar with mac , but this could also be used in that system ) . i would like to stress the fact that it is not necessary to type the ( long ) document using the coding system , rather the file must typed as usual , with accented and umlauted vowels as well as the rest of the characters needed in the language , and just after that you make a copy of the file and on that copy you change the 8 - bit characters for 7 - bit sequences according to the table provided . this procedure is * not * manual , for this you use the search-and - replace facility normally available in your word processor or editor ( remember : the dos editor has it ) . this can be done for most languages in ten or fewer passes ( less than one minute , varying with the size of the file ) . it is important to let the recipient know that you have coded the file in this fashion . append a note at the beginnig of the document to that effect , with a suggestion to use the search-and - replace facility to make the reverse changes , as well as the table of changes and samples . feel free to edit ( and / or translate ) what follows if you wish to make the note shorter by including only what is pertinent for a given language . | a . model of a note :