On Mon, 19 Jun 2000 10:19:17, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> 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]
Dear Christof,
Although I do not know Eastern European languages I know the problems.
Code page 437, which I prefer due to the many scientific and graphic
caracters, has been replaced by the much more common 850 nowadays and at
present by WORD caracter sets.
Oh boy, what a confusion and a hell of a job in manual conversion.
I made a conversion program (in BASIC) to speed up the conversion.
First I convert everything to 8-bit ASCII... all the information is
still in the text file but often not in the wanted caracters.
Then I start the BASIC conversion program that has a list of caracters
to convert into any other wanted caracter.
This works very nice... except for some caracters that are NOT in the
WORD caracterset.
Than WORD gives a large string with means: this caracter can be found in
the special WORD codepage #x and you have get caracter #y on that
codepage.
An example is the 'omega' sign, much used in electronics to denote
'resistance' and also in the Greek alfabet.
In code page 437 it is #234 but Micro$oft gives something like the
string:"}{\f0\fs22 {\field{\*\fldinst SYMBOL 87 \\f "Symbol" \\s
11}{\fldrslt\f3\fs22}}}{\f0\fs22"
My conversion program can't handle strings and certainly no strings as
complicated as this one... and containing blanks.
I am sure there is a way to this idiot way of WORD coding... but as we
go along Mr. Bill will 'invent' some new things that will make text
conversion an awfull difficult job again.
VIEW.exe just gives a black 'I don't know' square on these caracters and
the original 8-bit ASCII which holds the information is lost.
A friend of mine uses the new "euro" sign in WORD... this gives a
caracter code "\'80" and this starts a special program that writes the
euro-sign onto the screen and to the printer (graphical mode).
But sender and receiver must BOTH have the special programm \'80 to
communicate the euro sign.
Maybe we can use one or more special programms that react on a special
caracter code in a text... seems complicated but it would be possible.
Greetings Bastiaan
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