Re: A Real puzzler

["Robert Holmgren" holmgren@xxxxxxxx]

** Reply to message from "Patricia M. Godfrey"
 on Fri, 20 Jul 2007 19:57:08 -0400


>>>> has been that sensation is 246 "impoverished" vis-a-vis our
actual

Don't you mean 264?

>> I'm not following all this, but to paste I use not
>> clip.exe but U2 clipw.

> U2 Clipw CALLS clip.exe

Yes, CLIP.EXE underlies all these U2 Copy/Paste facilities.
Otherwise, I'm not following it either. But let's leave it
alone...

>> It looks right in my Eudora, too.

> It does NOT look right in Tbird. If that were real Windows
> native CP 1251

Native CP is 1250

> it would have real curly quotes.

I think that what may be confusing you (or your software) is
that the Xy4 *extended character set* (characters >255) consists
of 3-byte characters, correctly interpreted and displayed by
Speedo fonts only. The Windows APIs that I use in CLIP don't
know anything about those characters; they only know 1-byte
characters. The Windows API is going to translate CP1250 curly
quotes into standard "" quotes when pasting into Xy4 -- because
there aren't any curly quotes in the CP437 or CP850 character
sets, so what other choice does the API have? I mean, if
CLIP.EXE wanted to examine every bloody character in a Paste
string for potential conversion to 3-byte char, I guess it could
do that, but... it would be slow, yikes. In other words, the
extended chars are only understood within the tight closed
environment of Xy4<>Speedo. (A very few work in my Postscript
PRN (POSTGHST.PRN) because I explicitly translate them: in the
(huge) extended range 256 to 909, I translate just 14 of the
most popular characters -- if you want more or different ones,
add them.)

-----------------------------
Robert Holmgren
holmgren@xxxxxxxx
-----------------------------