> Date: Sat, 17 Jun 2000 15:17:39 +0000
> From: "Bastiaan Edelman" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Subject: Re: Viewing RTF and other stuff
>
> I mostly use codepage 437 (IBM extended ASCII) and upto now I found two
> caracters that did not convert right:
> root sign - code (alt) 251
> degree - code (alt) 248 and some others will popup.
>
> Accented European caracters are OK.
>
> Maybe we have to live with that... maybe we can place other
caractersets
> into 'VIEW'. I just tried a .rtf file and that was nearly OK.
> I had to strip off a two line header.
>
In pre-computer age the official World Champions of Typewriting used
to be from Czechoslovakia. The reason was that czech is the latin
alphabet with the biggest number of diacritical characters.
There are a couple of good DOS utilities to view, convert and print
formated texts from Word-for-Windows, RTF or HTML, as far as the
Westeuropean languages (ISO-8859-2, DOS cp 437, WIN cp1252) are
concerned. But what if you have to work with texts containing East
European diacritics (ISO-8859-2 / Windows cp 1250)?
I am quite often receiving RTF texts produced by East European
versions of WINDOWS. Unfortunately the versions of Word 5.5 and 6.0
for DOS that I have, import and export only West European RTF. And it
is the same with all the DOS freeware and shareware utilities I
have found, yet (e.g. MARTHA/ISHTAR, View). Although the RTF-files
are still containing the 8-bit code (in my case it is WINDOWS cp
1250), during the preformatting or viewing process it is lost,
resp. reduced, because the programs only know West European 8-bit.
So what I have learned to live with is deformatting everything to
ASCII text first, then do the codepage conversion and finally
reformate the texts manually again. I cannot say that I am happy with
this. What about setting up a new World Championship of Converting
Formatted Documents while Preserving Cultural Diversity of Eastern
and Western Europe?
Christof Lange - Prague
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
