On Wed, 17 Jul 2002, David W. Fenton wrote: > Please, give me a reference somewhere on the web for the ASCII codes for > Ctrl-a->z and Ctrl-A->Z. Ctrl-0->9 is optional. > > And I mean *ASCII* codes, not ANSI or keyboard scan codes.
Hmmm... Strictly speaking, ASCII codes are 7-bit values in the range 0-127. Except for the first 32 (in the range 0-31)--which are control codes used in communications, for carriage returns, form feeds, etc.--and the last one (127), which is a "delete" character--the ASCII codes can all be input by pressing standard unshifted or shifted keys on most keyboards. It starts get interesting with 8-bit (and longer) codes--those in the range 128-255, for the moment. Those are variously called "extended ASCII, ANSI," and a whole bunch of other names, depending on what language (English, French, Polish, Russian, Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, etc.) you speak. For most Western European Languages (English, French, German, Afrikaans, Basque, Catalan, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, ...) the codes in the range 128-255 map to either ISO-8859-1 (or the new ISO-8859-15 to include the Euro symbol) or Win-1252 (encoding names). From what I can tell, ANSI is a term used by Microsoft to refer to Win-1252--its own version of ISO-8859-1, which (now) includes the Euro symbol, as well as a few characters in the range 128-159 that are not defined in ISO-8859-1. Now, how various keyboards enter those various characters varies from OS to OS, and from locale to locale. (I am ignoring for the moment all the issues of the other ISO-8859-n and Win-125n encodings, which have different characters in the extended (128-255) range.) On English Windows (last I checked), it is possible to input extended characters by pressing NumLock, then, while pressing Alt, keying (on the numeric key pad) the decimal value of the character, with leading zero. Thus, to input a copyright symbol on Windows, enter Ctrl-0169 (using the numeric keypad to enter 0169). Last time I used a Mac (many moons ago), there was some utility to display what characters would be entered by the keyboard in the various unshifted, control, alt, etc. state. I hope I haven't stated too much inaccurate information above. (Feel free to correct any typos, oversights, inaccuracies, etc.) This is just the tip of the iceberg as far as encodings go. There are MANY encodings, including Unicode, the 2-byte version of which can represent a maximum of 65536 characters (minus a whole bunch of control and special characters, etc.) in many languages at the same time. Applications that use Unicode (including current versions of most of Microsoft's office applications) can represent Polish, Hebres, Greek, Arabic, Vietnamese, Japanese, and Korean characters in the same document. Awhile back I asked about the availability of a Japanese version of Finale (and was told that one does exist). Now, what I REALLY want to know is what encoding it uses to represent text ... (There are at least THREE common Japanese encodings in use today, not counting Unicode-based encodings!) Then (of course), there are the complexities added because the encodings of MUSIC characters (notes, clefs, etc.) that Finale uses, ALSO occupy the values 1-255. Sorry for the long post. While it might not have cleared anything up, I hope it at least raises some awareness of coding issues ... Weldon Whipple Software Engineer (with significant I18N--Internationalization--experience, but not relating to music ...) -- Weldon Whipple [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.whipple.org _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
