DOS v Win encoding

[Bill Troop billtroop@xxxxxxxx]

As a type designer I ought to know more about encoding, but I don't.
What I do know is that there is a standard Windows encoding, above
ascii 128, for common Western European accented letters, right and
left quotation marks, section, etc. etc. There is also a Mac encoding
which has most of the same characters, though in different places.
Then we have DOS, which also has some sort of upper-ascii system, and
whatever XyWrite/Bitstream have come up with.

Is there any way to get XyWrite to 'perform' in Windows or Mac encoding?
Here's an example. e-acute in Mac reads as A-umlaut in XyWrite and
reads as Z-caron when I open the text file in Eudora or Notepad on Vista.
Wouldn't it be nice to able to press a key and get XyWrite to see
upper-Ascii in a different flavor? Is there some way of doing this
that I have been unaware of all this time?