Re: FW: Spanish, screen fonts, HP

[jxz@xxxxxxxx]

Harriet wrote:

> I put ESC R 11 (p. 8:11 from Epson printer manual for
> "selecting international character set Spain II".

If my memory servers me right, that Epson belongs to a time
when programs and printers used only 127 characters - so no
accented characters online. The solution adopted was to
borrow little-used ASCII characters (like [ ] { } ) and
replace them with accented vowel ones.

Then the PC came along with, wonder of wonders, 256
characters in its character set. Room for accents and who
knows what. (In some of their printers, Epson used the
upper 128 characters for italic versions of the lower ones.
 But some of them had the two systems side by side - 256
chr PC sets, 128 chr early sets. So you may be lucky.)

Windows has keyboard drivers for all the common languages -
enabling you to bind accented characters to keyboard keys
and see them on screen. But it's a mixed blessing because
the keytops on a US keyboard no longer correspond to the
character they produce ..

Xy 3 & 4 can handle either old or new printers - as long as
the right printer file is loaded. They'll put on screen the
characters in the current "code page". If the printer is
using the same page, no conversion is needed. But if the
printer is of the old generation then you'll need one of
Xy's substitution tables. To convert, for instance, { to é .

I don't think you need Xy's screen fonts unless you're
using its graphical view. If you're content to use the
standard text screen and print from that, you're home.
(Other members of the list will correct me if I'm wrong.)

But for printer driving, it makes a difference whether
you're running Xy in a windows dos box or in a straight dos ..

For a quick and very kludgy solution for an old printer,
if you can't find the right xy printer driver for it,

- either choose the Spanish setting of the configuration
(dip) switches on the printer

- or modify your xy printer driver so that it outputs the Esc
R nn (to switch the printer to the Spanish version of the
shared characters. To put the printer back to normal, the
easiest thing is to turn it off then back on again.)

Then, to get Spanish accented characters, type their
ASCII variants:

[ for ¡ (upside down exclamation mark)
^ for Ñ (upper case ~ N)
] for ¿ (upside down question mark)
| for ñ (lower case ~ n)
} for ç (c cedilla)

(I think these correspondences are right - I no longer have
a proper printer manual.)

If you need vowels with diereses (umlauts or double dots) or
circumflexes, it's more complex. The printer can do them
only by printing the accent then backspacing and printing
the character (or vice versa).

But if you find a Spanish xy printer driver, all this will
be taken care of for you. And if you've got a modern
printer, you don't need to do any more than type the
characters. To put them on the numeric pad keys, just alter
lines in your keyboard file like:

71=7
to
71=è
or whatever

John