ISO/IEC 8211 home page

ISO/IEC 8211 is a standard used as a transport mechanism by various geographic information transfer standards. I worked on the last version of 8211, and am currently on the defects committee that is looking at making some of the documentation of the use of extended character sets (read: ISO/IEC 10646, aka Unicode) more obvious. I've promised various people to produce a FAQ page for the standard, and what follows is my very provisional start at that. All comments are welcome!

• The Introduction and Scope to the standard.
  (With thanks to ISO for permission to quote these.)
• FAQ
  Frequently asked questions.
• Revised clause 7
  This is a rendering of the result of applying the appropriate defect reports to Clause 7 of the existing ISO/IEC 8211. It is not binding on anyone for anything, and it is not official ISO/IEC anything (indeed, if it were, I would not be able to show it, as they own the copyright to their documents).
• iso8211 package
  This is a package written in Python. It provides support for reading ISO 8211 files (DDFs). It is not production software, nor is it finished, nor does it use all of the current facilities of Python that I would use if I were writing it now.

  I originally started writing this as an exercise in understanding the standard, and in the use of Python itself, but I continued its development for use in `debugging' ISO 8211 files, and I am making it available in case it is of use to anyone else. Any comments will be very welcome.

  Note that this does not work under Python 1.5. The main cause is that it uses "ni", but there may be other infelicities lurking inside. I hope to fix it "at some time in the future".

See also ISO/IEC 8211:1994, which is a page of tutorials and examples (including some software) by Dr. Alfred A. Brooks. Dr. Brooks is one of the originators of ISO/IEC 8211, and has been convenor of the recent standards efforts, and defects editor for the recent corrections.

Last modified: Wed Apr 1 09:06:40 BST 1998