Re: Changing character sets in Xy4 [ was Re: TYP and XY3]

["Robert Holmgren" holmgren@xxxxxxxx]

** Reply to message from Lisa Kleinholz  on Tue, 1 Feb
2005 15:33:44 -0800 (PST)

Lisa:

> I'm using Xy4 with the 437 character set
> (I think). Should I change? How?

Not to worry. I'm simply saying that as computing changes, old programs need
to try to keep up. The web has completely taken over. This propels HTML into
the forefront of computing. Not that XyWrite users need to care about that,
unless they're coding web pages (and XyWrite does that nicely, although not
like Frontpage -- you're hand-coding when you write HTML in XyWrite). Anyway,
Microsoft invented a new character set, called CodePage 1252. It's an
adaptation of Latin-1, but they changed it a bit, made it proprietary. Almost
every program made for PCs uses this character set. And HTML, the basis of
almost all web pages, uses its Latin-1 parent. If XyWrite wants to communicate
transparently with these programs, it needs to think about 1252.  Even
"communicating transparently" is a bit tricky, because virtually no modern
programs use raw text the way XyWrite does; they all have proprietary coding
methods that combine formats and text in a binary manner that you can't read
with the naked eye.

What, in practice, does 1252 mean? Not a lot, if you write in English and
never access European characters, never need a ¢ cent sign or a ¶ paragraph
symbol, don't pay in ? Euros or £ sterling, never use an ? ellipsis or
diacritics, don't write about ×÷ arithmetic, etc.  Sounds like the 4% who live
in North America. If you don't need any of that, do nothing. If you do need
it, then moving to 1252 makes sense. I find myself in 1252 about half the
time, because I do a lot of work with European languages. You can shift to
1252 permanently and fairly easily, although there's more to it than just
changing your font. There's a complete system for doing this embedded in U2,
with support files at XyWWWeb.

But don't do it if you don't need it.

-----------------------------
Robert Holmgren
holmgren@xxxxxxxx
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