Thank you to everyone who has responded to my inquiry. I appreciate it. As some of you have suggested, I had already used the encoding menu in the bottom left side of the BBEdit window, even before I wrote into the list. Doing so does not help.
As I mentioned earlier, the fact that my BBS software won’t even recognize the code page 437 characters which I extracted from a program which was specifically made to draw PC-ANSI graphics for BBSes, strongly suggests to me that the problem is with the BBS software itself. In other words, I don’t think that the problem is with BBEdit. I just think that Hermes — the BBS software — is so old, that it uses some flavor of code page 437 characters which is somehow different from modern versions of the same code. Darren is probably right regarding Wikipedia converting the characters to unicode so that they will display properly on a web page, or in a regular text document. But when even the characters extracted from an actual PC-ANSI drawing program don’t work in the BBS software, that tells me something: there is something different about the characters that the Hermes software uses. In the end, what I was forced to do in order to draw the new ANSI screens for my resurrected BBS, was copy the code page 437 characters from the different ANSI screens which are included with the BBS software, and paste them into a document created by another old BBS software called Public Address, which does recognize the characters from Hermes. Public Address has a built-in ANSI editor which not only allows you to draw ANSI screens in it, but it allows you to preview your screens as you draw them, and even test them at different modem speeds. The only problem is that you have to know how to type them with your keyboard to begin with, which invokves a lot if pick and shovel work. The ANSI characters which I found within Hermes itself are very limited. They are not the complete set of code page 437 characters. Ism thinking that if I can find some other externals — a.k.a. doors — which still work with Hermes, I might be able to extract more characters from them. Only a few externals still work with Hermes, and they were of little help. Nevertheless, working with the limited set of characters that I was able to extract from Hermes, I have thus far made new Main Menu, Transfer Menu, and Welcome screens for my BBS in the Public Address ANSI editor. Needless-to-say, it is very slow, tedious work for a 70 year old guy with back problems and very poor vision, but I’m getting it done for the love of the hobby. Why else would I resurrect my BBS three or four times since 1993? 😆😀🤣 Again, thanks to everyone who has tried to help. And, Rich, sorry if we got a bit off-topic with this. 😀 Kind regards, Bill Kochman -- This is the BBEdit Talk public discussion group. If you have a feature request or need technical support, please email "supp...@barebones.com" rather than posting here. Follow @bbedit on Twitter: <https://twitter.com/bbedit> --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "BBEdit Talk" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to bbedit+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/bbedit/1481F1B0-1282-42CA-BC04-078AC4A21789%40gmail.com.
