Hallo Herbert!

 HR>  "IBMPC",        
 HR>  "ASCII"
 HR>  "LATIN-1"
 HR>  "MAC"

 HR> defined in FTSC. All of them are single byte.

The most recent document is FSP 1013, not FSC 54. FSP 1013, among other
things, specifies IBMPC to be obsolete; it should be replaced by
"CP850", "CP437", "CP865" or
"CP866", depending on what codepage you actually are using (of
course this needs to be extended to other codepages of relevance in
Fidonet)

This is irrelevant to the question if big-5 is used in FTNs or not, of
course. If I were a Chinese writer, I would of course use some font that
could express my language, no matter if there is some stupid FTSC document
that allows me to do it or not.

 HR> Tobias Ernst (2:2476/418) is currently working on an extension but 
 HR> it's far from useable. 

It's not an extension, it's an implementation, and it works in Msged.
Making it a library and sending it to you is on my todo list :-).

 HR> I don't know if his extension will include UNICODE or not.

It won't.

Viele Gr��e,
Tobias

--- Msged/2 TE 06 (pre)