Bruce, my browser read your message as ISO-8859-1 so your special
symbols came out just fine.
The real culprit is that the old default setting for years has been
ASCII, which provides only 128 characters, inherited from the teletype
days. Teletypes did not do super- and subscripts! The best they could do
was to provide a "shift" character set, but that was all on the same
line. Extended ASCII merely takes advantage of the eighth bit to double
the number of characters available but nobody ever sat down to pick a
standard set for those extra characters. Thus each company (Microsoft,
Apple, et al.) defined their own extended sets. No one company in
particular is to blame.
Jim
Been there, phased the signal, monitored the loop current, heard the
chatter and the bell, and swept up the bits of chad. Put that in your
pipe and smoke it, Mr. Morse!
Bruce Raup wrote:
>
> On 2001-05-30 18:00 +1000, Pat Naughtin wrote in USMA:13148:
....
> > I try, as far as possible to use the alternate form of m3 for cubic metre in
> > email posting but I feel guilty about it because this is the act of a wimp.
> >
> > Where do we find out who is responsible for the software that changes m (with a
>superscript 3) to m" rather than to m3 and how do we get them to rewrite the software
>so that it begins to use ISO standards.
> >
> > Is it someone at Microsoft? And if so who?
>
> I think the culprit is Microsoft. Their "embrace and extend" approach to
> standards is frequently an "embrace and extinguish" tactic, and I think
> that's what is happening here. They have defined their own character
> sets, and they work fine as long as they don't leave the realm of Windows.
> But of course, on the Internet, they do leave that realm.
>
> Can you set your character set to ISO-8859-1? I believe the following
> test contains characters from that set:
>
> p� = k A�
> 1000 nm = 1 �m
>
> Could everyone read those fine? (Should say, "p squared = k A cubed" and
> "1000 nm = 1 micrometer" (with micrometer symbolic).)
>
> Bruce
>
> --
> Bruce Raup
> National Snow and Ice Data Center Phone: 303-492-8814
> University of Colorado, 449 UCB Fax: 303-492-2468
> Boulder, CO 80309-0449 [EMAIL PROTECTED]
--
Metric Methods(SM) "Don't be late to metricate!"
James R. Frysinger, CAMS http://www.metricmethods.com/
10 Captiva Row e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Charleston, SC 29407 phone/FAX: 843.225.6789
