Kermit and the Euro

Since Kermit is not financial software, it does not deal with currency per se. However, as communications software, it must be concerned with transfer and display of characters between one computer and another, usually requiring translation between one character set and another.

For communications software to be "Euro compliant", it must support the character sets that contain the Euro character, and it must be able to correctly translate among them.

The following Table lists character sets that contain the Euro symbol and shows which Kermit programs support these character sets. Kermit programs not shown in the table have no explicit Euro support.

Legend:
  T = Supported as a terminal character set
  X = Supported as a transfer character set
  F = Supported as a file character set
                                                                                  
                                 Code for    C-Kermit   K-95   C-Kermit   K-95
Character Set                    Euro (hex)    6.0     1.1.17    7.0     1.1.19

  Unicode 3.0 (UCS-2)               20AC       ---      ---      -XF      -XF
  Unicode 3.0 (UTF-8)              E282AC      ---      ---      TXF      TXF
  ISO 8859-15 Latin Alphabet 9(1)    A4        ---      T--      TXF      TXF
  PC Code Page 850(2)                D5        T-F      T-F      T-F      T-F
  PC Code Page 857                   D5        ---      T--      ---      T--
  PC Code Page 858                   D5        ---      T--      T-F      T-F
  Windows Code Page 1250             80        ---      T--      T-F      T-F
  Windows Code Page 1251             88        ---      T--      T-F      T-F
  Windows Code Page 1252             80        ---      T--      T-F      T-F
  Windows Code Page 1253             80        ---      T--      ---      T--
  Windows Code Page 1254             80        ---      T--      ---      T--
  Windows Code Page 1255             80        ---      T--      ---      T--
  Windows Code Page 1256             80        ---      T--      ---      T--
  Windows Code Page 1257             80        ---      T--      ---      T--
                                                                                  

Notes:

1. In K95 1.1.17, Latin-9 is mistakenly called Latin-15.
2. CP850 was changed by IBM to include the Euro symbol in OS/2 only.

The ability to display the Euro symbol depends on its presence in the font used by your display device. You will probably require updated fonts from your vendor, such as:

• IBM
• Microsoft

For two Euro-compliant Kermit programs to transfer a file coded in a character set that contains the Euro symbol, they should use Latin-9, UTF-8, or UCS-2 as the transfer character set.

Links:

• All about the Euro
• Kermit 95
• C-Kermit
• Kermit Home Page