Committee Reports > List of Committees > Joint > 1988 > Committee on the Irish Language (2nd Committee) > Report No. 05 - Influence of Computerisation on the Irish Language

Appendix 4

Letter and directive from the Department of Finance

To each Personnel Officer

Information Technology and Irish Language Requirements

Dear Personnel Officer,

I am directed by the Minister for Finance to say that he has been considering the requirements of the Irish Language in respect of the display and representation of acute accented vowels and other related matters in the light of the now widespread use in Departments/Offices of word processing and other computerised text handling facilities.

Departments/Offices should,

(a)wherever possible, adjust immediately existing computer equipment to incorporate, within the text processing and handling functions, the ability to enter and output the sineadh fada on all documents which include Irish text issuing to the public, and

(b)where new or upgrade equipment is being acquired, include in the Request for Proposals a reference to the appropriate standards on graphic character representation so that the equipment being acquired will incorporate the necessary facilities.

Those Departments/Offices that exchange textual material through the medium of Information Technology with other State bodies may wish to draw the attention of such bodies to the provisions of this letter in order to facilitate such future exchange.

In the Appendix hereto, further guidance is given in respect of adjusting existing configurations and the standards to be referenced in Requests for Proposals for new or upgrade equipment.

Please bring this letter and Appendix to the attention of officers concerned with the operation and acquisition of IT facilities.

Yours sincerely,

E. Embleton

Assistant Secretary

Appendix

Existing Installations

It is necessary to provide immediately for the printing of the síneadh fada on documents issuing to the public. Suppliers should be consulted on how this can be best achieved with existing computer configurations. Note that it is relatively easy to adjust laser printers for this purpose, but that there may be difficulties with the dot matrix or daisy wheel varieties. If necessary, printing of documents for the public should be restricted to those printers which have been successfully adjusted for this purpose.

The following constraints will apply when accented vowels are incorporated into the normal automated text processing facilities:

- In sorting text, the accented vowel will not usually be placed beside the corresponding unaccented vowel;

- Text retrieval packages will not recognise the accented vowel: in this instance it is better to use a wildcard character in place of the vowel in the search key;

- Word processing and desktop publishing software packages generally incorporate spell-checking facilities but these will not handle or recognise the accented vowels;

- The automatic hyphenation rules contained in text processing software packages will not be suitable for Irish text.

In the longer term, in order to facilitate the exchange of computer-readable data either by electronic mail/messaging or via storage devices such as diskettes, it will be necessary for the same internal bit-mapped representation for accented vowels to be used by all Departments/Offices. Given the wide base and variety of installed computer equipment, however, it is recognised that it will be some time before this situation can be fully achieved.

New and upgraded acquisitions

The National Standards Authority of Ireland have recently certified the use of an Irish standard for graphical character representation: IS/ENV 41 503 (Information Systems Interconnection: European Graphic Character Repetoires and their coding) for this purpose. The following base standards which are referenced by this Irish standard are due to be certified shortly as Irish standards:

ISO 6937/2 Information processing - Coded character sets for text communications - Part 2 : Latin alphabetic and non-alphabetic graphic characters (1983) : Addendum 1 (1986).

ISO 8859/1 Information processing - 8-bit single byte coded graphic character sets - Part 1 : Latin alphabet No. 1 (1986).

IS/ENV 41 503 specifies the internal representation of the acute accented vowels, both upper and lower case. In future, when seeking either new or upgrade hardware, rather than an extension of the existing configuration, prospective suppliers should be asked in the Request For Proposals to provide equipment that conforms to this standard, or, if this is not possible, to indicate when this feature will be supported.

In this context, it should be noted that some suppliers already allow for the handling of Irish Language text but that this has generally been achieved through the use of their own proprietary bit-mapping standards. The suppliers should be notified of the requirements to implement the Irish standard IS ENV 41 503 and be asked for a time-table for their conformance with this standard.

The supplier of new equipment will be responsible for adjusting the keyboards and printers to allow for the entry and reproduction of the accented characters.