On Wed, Apr 18, 2012 at 12:38 PM, Doran, Michael D <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> > ISO 2709 doesn't care how many bytes your characters are. The directory
> > and offsets and other things count bytes, not characters.
>
> That was exactly my point.  (Which I am stating since you quoted me and I
> couldn't tell if you were refuting my point, or using it to support your
> conclusion.)  ;-)
>

Z39.2 counts octets, but say they're counting characters.  If you find a
record that appears to use characters instead of bytes, ignore it; it's
legacy R'LMARC, which has been declared officially dead- it's Z39.2/ISO2709
that are eternally lying.

UNIMARC *can* allow UCS-2 encodings in data fields, but it  does not seem
possible for this to imply that lengths are in characters on any charitable
reading. This is because the information that UCS-2 will be used is located
at a non-zero offset within a fixed field. If offsets were in character
units, rather than bytes, it would not be possible to locate this value
within the field.

Simon