Re: XYWRITE digest 1043

[Richard Giering dick.giering@xxxxxxxx]

Bill: You're comments are very "to the point". I suggest you look into a
freeware set of software from The Netherlands that allows all sorts of
diacritics to be used in windows (since XW has its own KBD, it does not work
there). It is available from:
http://allchars.polder.net
 I've been using it for a number of years for my umlauts (and it appears to
generate the same character set as XW Insert functionality does.
Thought you'd like to know
Dick Giering

Bill Mallon wrote:

> XyWriters-
>
> I probably spend more time playing with and dealing with diacriticals than
> anybody I know. I work as a consultant to the International Olympic
> Committee databasing all the Olympic results and the name spellings in the
> various languages contain literally hundreds of different accent marks. I
> work primarily in XyWrite since the original text files were coded in that
> format since about 1985. But the IOC and many other places need the
> material in MS Word or other similar formats (Excel especially) to place
> into their web sites. I've developed numerous ways to handle the problem,
> none of them simple.
>
> First of all, it is not proper anymore to simple use "oe" etc. to replace
> German umlauts. That is why we have computers and word processors so that
> words can now be spelled correctly across various languages. Hungarian has
> many unusual accent marks and they get livid if they are omitted as they
> end up changing the meaning of many words, similar to the Miami Herald
> story about dropping the tildes.
>
> Secondly, the Western European accent marks are not a major problem - the
> acutes, graves, umlauts, circumflexes,etc. ASCII recognizes these and they
> show up on the screen correctly. Converting to MS Word via WordPort ends
> up with these converted correctly as well. If you choose to convert
> manually as a text file, this does not work, but one can write a simple XPL
> program (I have several) that converts the diacriticals and then when
> loaded into HTML they show up correctly.
>
> A much bigger problem is Eastern European accents such as the hacek
> (inverted v over a letter). They have no ASCII equivalent but in the late
> 80s I wrote programs so that XyWrite can recognize them and print them
> correctly - but they are not WYSIWYG on the screen. I have learned to
> recognize my arcane character codes for them.
>
> Again these are handled in conversion by an XPL program to convert XyWrite
> to MS Word diacriticals. It works somewhat like the old Adobe
> Word-for-Word conversions. Each character has to be converted first to
> coded format - all look like #s&v#. The ## is the symbol that this will be
> a diacritical. The first letter "s" is the base, and the second "v" is the
> diacritical mark. These get converted to MS Word or Excel or FoxPro and
> then I have programs in them to convert #s&v# into the proper symbol - an s
> with a hacek. That is not easy either because Microsucks has not provided
> the ability to do a replace with these unusual accents marks so I had to
> develop a strange macro that calls them from a separate file. Fortunately
> it works.
>
> Another possible way to handle diacriticals is to use the Character Map in
> MS Office Accessories and cut/paste them into your e-mail document. That
> is actually what I do a lot when writing a simple e-mail message.
>
> I would provide my XPL programs for the group but they tend to be very
> specific to my set of coding. I use 7LJ3-7J.PRN for my printer file to
> recognize these characters and the character set it use is slightly
> different than a standard XyWrite character set. I chose it because it has
> the capabililty to make more diacriticals than any other XyWrite character
> set. If you're not using this *.PRN file, and you're likely not, my XPL
> programs would not work for you.
>
> Hopefully, someday much of this will be easier when Unicode gets to become
> more standard, as Nathan Sivin has lamented before. His concern is Chinese
> character sets which get even more complicated. But the current problem
> with Unicode is the cut and paste function in MS Word - it does not
> properly recognize Unicode yet, although one can enter Unicode characters
> directly into the document. That makes conversion between programs fairly
> difficult.
>
> Sorry to go on, but this problem occupies a large part of my life. Hope
> this has helped somebody.
>
> Bill