CEN Guide to the Use of Character Sets in EuropeTC 304

8-Bit Character Sets - ISO/IEC 10538

Current edition

ISO/IEC 10538:1991
Information technology - Control functions for text communication (first edition).

Description

ISO/IEC 10538 defines the control functions, and their coded representations, needed for use in text communication. The coded representations are intended for use when the control functions concerned are embedded in the communicated text, not when they are separated from the text as elements of a communication protocol.

Tutorial guidance

ISO/IEC 10538 is divided into three sections. The first section provides a general introduction. The second section specifies control functions for text in a page-image format in which the sender's and recipient's pages are intended to be identical. The third section specifies control functions for text that may be either in a formatted or a reformattable form, suitable for use where the sender's and recipient's fonts differ.

With two exceptions, the control functions of ISO/IEC 10538 have been taken from ISO/IEC 6429 but they have been given more specific definitions than in that standard. The exceptions are the functions PAGE TERMINATOR (PT) and DOCUMENT TERMINATOR (DT). These are alternative names assigned by ISO/IEC 10538 to the control functions INFORMATION SEPARATOR THREE (IS3) and INFORMATION SEPARATOR FOUR (IS4) of ISO/IEC 6429, to represent their correspondingly more specific definitions.

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