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I won't sign the statement that these characters are missing, perhaps
they are defined in the system, but not implemented in the units. Maybe
it's a situation similar to the former DCC titling. The home units only
gave you the possibility to use upper case characters, the numbers and
some basic symbols, not more. If you inserted a pre-rec tape, what did
you see? The whole range of lower case characters, if coded by the
record company. Someone told me that the system could handle complete
ASCII, but no manufacturer implemented all ASCII characters in the
titling menu.
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The reason that would happen is that, in the case of the DCC titling issue,
a lot of the decks had a limited display facility which could only accept
upper-case characters, numbers and a few symbols. The display-driver
software would have to convert lower-case characters to uppercase
characters, and if the machine offered titling facilities, you could only
present those characters that the display can render, so as to provide
WYSIWYG titling for that unit.
Both the DCC and MiniDisc formats, as we know support complete ASCII
characters in their text fields, but the idea was to provide only those
characters that the machine can render comfortably on its display. The
display-driver would then have to make an approximate rendition of unuseable
characters such as foreign characters and, if it can't show lower-case
characters, it would have to implement a UCase() function on the incoming
text string.
Earlier Philips DCC home-deck displays used a "squared-font" display that
looked more like a hybrid between "segment-text" displays and dot-matrix
displays. Most MiniDisc home and portable units use a dot-matrix display
which is allowed to render upper-case and lower-case characters. But,
manufacturers can elect to use a "basic character set" consisting of
upper-case characters, numbers and some punctuation to reduce costs.
However, most would work the display-driver to the hilt and utilise all of
the characters that the particular display can show.
As for user-interface requirements, if the display uses a mix of upper-case
and lower-case characters when presenting system messages such as
error-messages, status confirmations and procedure-guidance information, the
machine would present a very friendly user interface.
With regards,
Simon Mackay
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