Re: Replacing foreign characters

[Richard Giering dick.giering@xxxxxxxx]

Hi:
 I commend you for your research and I have something to add. A significant
number of XYers also use NB. It appears to use still a different set in that
if a message is composed in NB and then copied (with the windows clipboard)
into a mail composition window, the sent message will be received with other
than the characters desired. I expirmented by sending an E-Mail to a friend
in Germany using the XY and the NB characters for Umlaut letters. The XY set
arrived readable while the NB set did not. If anyone want more details
including what was sent and the response from germany, pls lt me know and
I'll sen it.
Dick Giering

"Patricia M. Godfrey" wrote:

> Any and all of the solutions offered should work. If anyone is interested
> in the causes of this mess, a colleague and I have been doing some
> investigating. The first issue is that XyWrite is ASCII; most Windows
> programs use the ANSI/ISO-Latin standard, which is similar but has
> important differences. For example, lowercase e aigu (as in café) is 233
> in ANSI, 130 in ASCII, and therefore in XyW. To further confound things,
> Macs use yet a third coding system, and either of those values, sent by
> e-mail, will be read quite differently on a Mac. And of course, any "odd"
> character sent from a Mac will come out quite differently on a Wintel
> machine. Regardless of OS or app.
>     Essential typographic elements?em and en dashes, "smart" quotes,
> ellipsis?were never part of "Standard ASCII"; every word processor had
> its own schemes for producing them. XyWrite's is particularly rich. (Of
> course.) ANSI/ISO-Latin does have codes for these, though they are not
> all fully supported in all implementations. Here's a brief list of the
> equivalences of some of the more important ones:
> Character    XyW   ANSI
> em dash     260   151
> en dash     259   150
> open quotes   264   147
> close quotes  265   148
> apsotrophe   267   146
> ellipsis        258   133
>
> I have been toying with the idea of creating a printer driver (by
> modifying the old STRIP.PRN) whose substitution table would effect these
> conversions. That way, one could keep one's file in native XyWrite
> format, print out hard copy as one might need it, and then PRINTF when
> one needed to share it with someone in thrall to Micro$oft. Does anyone
> have any thoughts on the usefulness and workability of this?
>
> By the way, in ordinary Windows apps, if one installs the U.S.
> International Keyboard, one can get accented letters quite easily by
> using quotes for umlauts, apostrophe for aigu, and grave (the lowercase
> value of the tilde key) for grave. The keys are dead, and don't register
> until you hit the letter you want accented. The downside is that if you
> want an open quote, you have to remember to hit the space bar after it,
> or the first letter in your quotation will end up umlauted.
>
> Another warning: ANSI codes can be entered by the old ALT-number pad
> routine, just as ASCII ones could under DOS. The thing is, you have to
> add a zero before the three digits. That is, hold down ALT and type 0151
> on the number pad to get an em dash. I just assume XyWrite's keyboard
> preempts that, in both DOS and Win versions, so I've never even tried it,
> esp. as I have keyborad macros (F2-M and F2-N) for the dashes.
>
> Patricia M. Godfrey
> P and Q Editorial Services