Re: converting v4.017 diacritics -Reply

[Tom Roche troche@xxxxxxxx]

Many thanks to Holmgren, Baer, and everyone else who resonded to my
diacritical query.

The author has confirmed that he inputted the high ascii versions of the
affected characters. He did, not by using the dead-key method (which
would have produced the same result), but by "typing control-shift and
the XyWrite special character menu (F10, I, O) number (792 in the case of
e grave). This number was not always a high Ascii number (e aigu, for
example, is 130) but most were (eg all the odd circumflexed letters are
grouped around 800.)

I was able to read them in XyWin but not when converted to anything
else.

The characters above 255 converted as 3-character strings. Here is the
formula, courtesy of Holmgren: The first character was ascii 254. The
second was ascii 0 (underscore?) for 256, 1 for 257, etc., ascending
until 512, when it starts over at 0 (and starting over againt at 768). The
third was ascii 0 (for 256 to 511), ascii 1 (512 to 767), or ascii 2 (for 768
to 911). E grave was 254, 24, 2; a grave was 254, 19, 2, for example (I
had a printout to verify this.)

Since the high-ascii characters all converted to a string starting with ascii
254, I was able to find them all and run (I hope) a mistake-proof
search-and-replace.

The author used the "standard" font on his XyWrite 4.017 font menu. For
some reason he couldn't print the em-dash character (260), although
everything else printed fine. The files were in XyWrite 4.017 from the
beginning.

One further question: Would it be possible to run a search in Xy4 that
identifies all characters above 255, to identify such problems in advance?

Best,

Tom Roche
Johns Hopkins University Press
(410) 516-6897