Re: converting XyWrite 4.017 diacriticals

[TBaehr@xxxxxxxx]

Friends

≪ Sounds like a CodePage 850 problem to me. ≫

No. Vaguely possible it's an 850 code page (rather than the standard US
English 437) but I doubt it. The letters mentioned -- àèâôäë -- do
all seem
to come out OK in Windows screens. They're ASCII 133, 138, 131, 147, 132, 137
respectively. In XyWrite, their capital-letter counterparts are out of the
0-256 ASCII range, as are some other diacritically-marked letters. This is
because XyQuest wanted to provide the widest range of special characters it
could, including the drawing characters. So it put an offset of 654 in.
 This is how it works: for a lower-ASCII character like 133, you can add 654
to get 787. In a Xy4.017 screen, the two characters will look identical.
 But there are some characters, like the capital counterparts of the letters
in question, that appear ONLY in the stratosphere -- 837, 866, 836, 880, 865
will get you A with grave, E with grave, A circum, O curcum, E umlaut. (A
umlaut is 142, in the lower portion). The minus-654 versions of these
capitals are usually graphics characters. This is an ad-hoc Xy-only
solution.

Now, it could be that the lowercase versions in your docs were created using
the Xy "dead" accents feature. This feature lets you create accented
characters on the fly by typing CTRL+` (for instance) and then a letter. I
just tried it, and by golly, CTRL+` followed by e gives you character 787!
 See your Xy docs for how to create ascii characters by typing a key combo
like Alt+Shift and keying the number on the number pad (my keyboad maps this
to Ctrl+Alt+Shift, but I suspect that it's nonstandard).

I'm sure Robert H could write a program to transpose selected higher-than-256
characters to their lower counterparts. I'd just take a brute force approach
with a little XPL program that does invisible replaces (the CI command).
 Then do the conversion.

There is a trick involving creating and loading a special table to get
characters back down into the lower numbers--I just don't remember what it
is. Maybe the Baltimore gurus can help.

Other dead accents, btw: Ctrl+' for acute, Ctrl+" (use the shift key too) for
umlaut, Ctrl+~ (with shift key) for tilde, and I forget where the ^ is.

Tim Baehr
tbaehr@xxxxxxxx