Re: Another challenge for DELTAGS | non-Xy 'Can't Print 'ems'

["J. R. Fox" jr_fox@xxxxxxxxxx]

Carl Distefano wrote:

> The new version removes swathes of scripting code that the old one
> left in.

Haven't tried the "a" version yet.

> > is that "&-#" stuff for apostrophes -- for example -- standard,
> > and therefore targetable by DELTAGS ?
>
> HTML chars aren't tags, and DELTAGS has never attempted to convert
> them (except for a small, critical handful). Really, that would
> require a dedicated routine -- or, rather, a stable of routines,

O.K.

> because then the question would become, convert to what? ISO 8859-1
> (a/k/a Latin-1 a/k/a Ansi a/k/a Windows)? Extended Ascii?
> Xy4/Speedo? What about chars that don't "map"?

Dunno, to all the above, but good point.

> What I *may* add to
> DELTAGS is some limited conversion of punctuation and other
> typographical material to their plain-text, Ascii equivalents (smart
> quotes to """, smart apostrophes to "'", etc.).

Maybe that would suffice . . . .

> Beyond that, I don't think there's any rational, across-the-board
> assumption that
> can be made about the target character set, do you?

I don't understand this stuff sufficiently to give an intelligent
answer, but I suspect not.

> Since when have HTML chars begun to be assigned to the range 127-
> 159? E.g., in your test document, ‘ and ’ for the smart
> single quotes and — for the em dash.

Didn't author it, just found it.

> (Visit, e.g.,
> http://www.dataweb.nl/~otto/chars.html to see how your browser
> renders these numeric HTML "character references".) Traditionally,
> 127-159 were left unused. They're not mentioned in the HTML 4.01
> spec, http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/html40.txt. Are these perhaps
> IE extensions? Yet, my ancient copy of Netscape for OS/2 renders
> them correctly.

Nice Ref. sources, which I've now bookmarked. I may at least get some
real use out of the first one. And Yep, you can never go wrong blaming
something on MS & IE ! Makes sense to me.

I'm glad to see the old NS for OS/2 is still good for something !


Jordan