Re: XYWRITE digest 1043

[Richard Giering dick.giering@xxxxxxxx]

Bill:
 Your comments are very "to the point" I suuest you look into the freeware
"software" that is available from "http://allchars.polder.net;. I've been
using it for a number of years with the diacritics I use and there appear to be
others available. Which I'm not sure.
 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