Re: Another challenge for DELTAGS | non-Xy 'Can't Print 'ems'

[cld@xxxxxxxx (Carl Distefano)]

Reply to note from "J. R. Fox"  Wed, 22 Jan 2003
11:16:11 -0800

Jordan:

> I can try that one out too, and will let you know. Just tried
> the one you posted earlier, and did not notice that much of a
> difference in the results

The new version removes swathes of scripting code that the old one
left in.

> is that "&-#" stuff for apostrophes -- for example -- standard,
> and therefore targetable by DELTAGS ?

HTML chars aren't tags, and DELTAGS has never attempted to convert
them (except for a small, critical handful). Really, that would
require a dedicated routine -- or, rather, a stable of routines,
because then the question would become, convert to what? ISO 8859-1
(a/k/a Latin-1 a/k/a Ansi a/k/a Windows)? Extended Ascii?
Xy4/Speedo? What about chars that don't "map"? What I *may* add to
DELTAGS is some limited conversion of punctuation and other
typographical material to their plain-text, Ascii equivalents (smart
quotes to """, smart apostrophes to "'", etc.). Beyond that, I
don't think there's any rational, across-the-board assumption that
can be made about the target character set, do you?

Since when have HTML chars begun to be assigned to the range 127-
159? E.g., in your test document, ‘ and ’ for the smart
single quotes and — for the em dash. (Visit, e.g.,
http://www.dataweb.nl/~otto/chars.html to see how your browser
renders these numeric HTML "character references".) Traditionally,
127-159 were left unused. They're not mentioned in the HTML 4.01
spec, http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/html40.txt. Are these perhaps
IE extensions? Yet, my ancient copy of Netscape for OS/2 renders
them correctly.

--
Carl Distefano
cld@xxxxxxxx
http://users.datarealm.com/xywwweb/