What are DBCS ASCII and EUC?

In ideographic languages like Japanese, Chinese, and Korean, there are thousands of characters. All of these characters cannot be represented with a single byte of information because a single byte only accomodates 256 characters. Therefore, at least one more byte of information is required.

In DBCS ASCII files, each ideographic character is exactly two bytes. In EUC files, each ideographic character can be two, three, or four bytes, depending on the EUC implementation and language. Single-byte ASCII characters can be mixed in with DBCS and EUC characters.

InfoPrint Manager for Windows supports printing DBCS ASCII files in the Japanese and Traditional Chinese languages, which can contain formatting controls for the IBM 5577 or 5587 printers. InfoPrint Manager for Windows also supports printing EUC files in the Japanese, Traditional Chinese, and Korean languages, but you must submit those jobs from a UNIX or AIX workstation. EUC files cannot contain any formatting control characters.