Hironori Sakamoto wrote:
>
> > From: Markus Kuhn <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> > The people who use ISO 8859 also use or used CP437 (the original IBM
> > PC character set) is a widely used coded character set with a
>
> I know some CodePage are used on PC, but why did not xterm
> support CP437 if its characters are widely used and necessary ?
I know that CP437 was in the ROM of US video cards, and it was
what DOS users in the US used. I've heard that there were some
countries where the video card ROM did not have CP437. I've
also heard that users in other countries had to load some other
files and run some other commands, to use CP850, et al. So,
just how popular was/is CP437, especially outside the US?
DOS users in the US got moved from CP437 to CP1252 (a superset
of ISO 8859-1) during the DOS -> Windows switch about a decade
ago with Windows 3.x; one was using CP437 and CP1252 for a
while. Of course, in a GUI environment, you don't need the box
drawing characters of CP437, and you can draw tables in a word
processor, etc in a different way. I personally had some Spanish
language documents in CP437, which turned to gibberish when
interpreted as CP1252, but I don't think most (using only the ASCII
portion to write English) would've missed much more than the box
drawing characters. Even today, on a US edition of Windows,
the holding down the Alt key and typing a non-zero-prefixed three
digit decimal number on the keypad echoes how US DOS users
used to enter CP437 charcters that weren't on the keyboard, e.g.,
Alt-161 for LATIN SMALL LETTER I, even though 0xA0 (161d)
corresponds to the codepoint in CP437, not the current CP1252.
But I think the last new usages of CP437 really were in the
mid/late 1990's, at least for US DOS/Windows users. I think on
i386 Linux, it might have lasted a bit longer--the linux console I
used defaulted to CP437. Of course there is still some utility for
box drawing characters (CP437 or otherwise)--e.g., the cash
registers at supermarkets in some places use them, but I
question the need to run old DOS software--in some cases,
current PCs are too fast for them and they run into trouble with
timing loops, or the filesystem looks too strange to them. Do we
need to support the unique characters used on other old
platforms too?
Thomas Chan
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
-
Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels
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