Higher diacriticism

[Eric Van Tassel 101233.342@xxxxxxxx]

Thanks to various posters for pointing out that many accented characters
*seem* to appear more than once in the Xy4 (=XyWin) character set -- which
I knew but tend to forget -- and for explaining how the high-number
characters relate to their low-numbered analogues -- which I'd never
figured out.

>From time to time I've been asked to do an onscreen copyediting job in
XyWrite, for a publisher who has proudly assured me that the original files
were prepared in XyWrite. When, as has happened occasionally, I encounter
accented characters in the printout and onscreen that wouldn't respond to
routine search arguments, I've uttered dark imprecations against authors
who convert their files *into* XyWrite from one of those garbagey programs
like WP or MSW, but without understanding how to use the world's greatest
WP. I'm embarrassed to admit that it has never occurred to me that the
author might just have been doing what the "helpful" Windows version told
him -- Alt+I, O, S, L,  offers a menu of accented characters, most
of which are from the higher-order set.

(Incidentally, why not all of them? Why should the menu give 814 (not 160)
for a+acute, but 134 not 788 for a+angstrom?)

But having discovered XyWrite before XyWin came along, I (like I suppose
many/most members of this list) had long ago put all the accented
characters in readily accessible and mnemonicable places in my .KBD file;
thus I always draw a blank when my wife asks "Is u+umlaut a 132 or a 129?"
I can only shrug and answer "F11 + u".

Ever in search of new ways to do something more entertaining than my day
job, I guess I should now write a simple routine that will search for any
high-order character and convert it to its low-order counterpart. Since I'm
consuming bandwidth thinking aloud, I may as well add that since I already
have a CHARSET file listing all the Xy4 characters in alphabetical order,
I'll just delete the irrelevant ones, and then
    put each high-numbered character before its low-numbered
counterpart,
    insert  cia | before each high-numbered character and | after
it, and
    insert | after the low-numbered equivalent.

Cheers
Eric Van Tassel