RE: Rescue Xy3

[Carl Distefano CLDistefano@xxxxxxxx]

Reply to note from "Daniel L. De Hainaut"
 Thu, 27 May 1999 21:48:07 -0400

-> It does seem to me that the main thing that slows down the Xy4
-> unassigned character process is that there are so many more
-> characters to choose from beyond the 160 or so out of the
-> extended-ASCII 255 that we might have left unassigned on our
-> Xy3 keyboards. Simply paring down the available characters to
-> the classic 8 bits' worth would probably streamline things
-> considerably, at the expense of choice.

Funny you should mention this dilemma. Last month I decided to get
serious about solving it. The result is a XyWWWeb routine called
XYCHAR, which lets you produce any character (0-909) in the XyWrite
extended character set either by specifying its number OR by
describing it *in words*. Thus, to encode the degree symbol, you
issue either XYCHAR 248 or XYCHAR degree. The
syntax is forgiving ("grave e" works as well as "e grave") and
comprehensive: XYCHAR copyright, for example, gives access
to either the regular or superscript copyright (your choice). If
you don't happen to remember that the "mirrored under comma accent"
is character #745, you can supply any of those words as a "hint" to
XYCHAR and it will lead you to the desired symbol.

One further word: XYCHAR was introduced with version 43 of the Jumbo
U2. That initial release had a mistake which caused it to issue the
selected character twice. The error is fixed in the current release
(version 44), which I posted a few minutes ago.

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