Hi Emile,
Thanks for the extended info. Now I don't feel so bad. Its my first
experience into the cross platform world.
Regards,
Dave Bert
From: Emile Schwarz <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Reply-To: Getting Started <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Ascii code question
Date: Wed, 04 Jan 2006 10:25:15 +0100
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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