Hi Dave, the List,
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Subject: Re: Ascii code question
From: "Dave Bert" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Tue, 03 Jan 2006 11:23:29 -0600
Hi Emile,
I guess being a Windows user I always thought that the numbers above 127
were the extended ASCII characters and were the same everywhere. What was I
thinking! Thanks for the info on where to learn more. The links below are
the software apps I was asking about.
I can say, if it help your feeling, that Macintosh Users have the same feeling,
from their side: "the numbers past 127 were the extended ASCII characters" and
didn't even think at another platform 'till they put their hands on it ;)
I found a software - delivered with Windows - that shows characters whose values
are > 127 (ASCII and 'greater'), but I do not remember its name. I am sure that
as a Windows user you will find it in ... seconds.
There is the same thing under Mac OS: the Character Palette.
Those let you know the 'code point' of the character and what the character
looks like (and that a character like that exists !).
To use Non-ASCII characters, and IMHO to be XPlatform savy, use the UTF-8
encodings. Create a test application, run it under Mac OS X and see what happens.
Both Platforms (Mac OS X and Windows) have the same kind of troubles with the
characters been implemented or not in a specific Font. I am quite sure that
these troubles can exist under Linux too.
From my French experience, US font makers can create fonts with only a subset
of what non domestic users need: missing diacritical characters for example,
excepted copyright, registered, yen, and some other character they need in their
market (US domestic).
My past experience shows that they will issue better fonts (with more
characters) when their int'l users cry loud and teach them there is a market for
full featured fonts. (*)
In the matter of font displaying (and printing), texting (testing) is your best
bet / best friend. Try more than one machine if you can.
HTH,
Emile
(*) When Apple issue the Apple II in Europe long time ago, they were asked to
add some diacritical vovels. They do that in implementing a switch that swap the
display character, so { was a e acute (if my memory is correct) and some (less
than a dozen) characters had that treatment; same occured for printings.
This was changed when Lisa / Macintosh came to light: they have (like the Apple
IIe) all the ASCII set plus 128 other characters.
When in 1985 Microsoft started to use the Mac OS license to create Windows, they
fall into the trouble (remember the graphics characters under MS-DOS) and they
didn't want to copy the Macintosh Character table and so - excepted the
copyright character and some other (two or three) characters - they create their
own 128 thru 255 character Table.
I do not talk about the html character coding where I often saw characters
instead of the character tag (é instead of é for example). I also saw ':'
as the folder delimiter instead of '/'. Of course, since that works fine under
Windows, who care (who knows that a problem exists since it work [on my
machine/OS] ?).
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