Re: reply to Robert Holmgren on memory problems--special characters

[Robert Hemenway robhem@xxxxxxxx]

Further corrections to my note on special characters and the code pages.

In my e-mail of 6.21.98 I had this:



That?s not quite right. Perhaps what follows is right and is clearer.

The XyWrite numbers shown in the CHARSET file follow the PC-850 code
page through 255. From 255 through 909, they are XyWrite?s proprietary
code numbers, so far as I know. (With the standard Xy KBD, these
characters can be put in a file with Ctrl+Alt + the CHARSET number
entered on the numeric keyboard. The section mark, for instance, is
entered with C+A+245.)

Applications that run under Windows 3.1 and WINOS2 follow the Windows
3.1 code page, also called the Latin 1 or the ANSI code page. (These
characters can be entered in Windows apps--aside from XyWrite--with Alt
plus a zero followed by the ANSI code number. In an e-mail written in
Netscape, say, the section mark § is entered with Alt + 0167.)

French text downloaded in Netscape Explorer then called up in XyWin will
be garbled because the accented characters in Netscape, which follow the
ANSI page, are displayed in XyWin following the PC-850 page. So that the
e acute in Windows (ANSI) will display as U acute in Xy (850). Here?s a
sentence from a piece downloaded from Le Monde Diplomatique:

Le 20 mai 1998, la secrétaire d'Etat américain, Mme Madeleine Albright,
a demandé au président Suharto de démissionner pour ouvrir la voie à une
"transition dmocratique".

In XyWrite, it looks like this:

Le 20 mai 1998, la secrÚtaire d'Etat amÚricain, Mme Madeleine Albright,
a demandÚ au prÚsident Suharto de dÚmissionner pour ouvrir la voie Ó une
"transition dmocratique".

A search-and-replace (SNR) program in XyWrite can easily correct. Mine
runs now to 40 substitutions, which covers the principal West European
languages pretty well.

The first two columns in the chart comparing the code numbers on the two
code pages might better be headed Win (ANSI) and XyW (850).

With apologies for my confusions, Robert Hemenway