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Re: Counting/scanning error in Xy3 XPL , question about byte code 0FEh



Reply to note from wbass@xxxxxxxxxxxx Fri, 2 Aug 2024 20:56:10 +0000 (UTC)

> But in XyWrite 4 (only), my recollection is that byte value 0FEh
> became a second trigger character

Wally,

The FEh|254d byte signals a printable 3-byte character in XyWrite 4's extended character set (char
Nos. 256-1023), which uses the now-archaic Bitstream Speedo scalable fonts (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitstream_Speedo_Fonts).
The Xy4 installation includes a file called CHARSET, which lists the available characters. 

But the big leap forward in terms of extended Xy4 charsets came a couple of years ago, with Kari
Eveli's superb vDosPlus XyWrite 4 Service Pack (https://www.lexitec.fi/xywrite/utility.html).
The Xy4 SP supports WYSIWYG display and printing of characters not only in DOS code pages 437 and
850, but also 774 (Baltic languages), 852 (Central European), 857 (Turkish) and 866 (Cyrillic). It's
a tour de force, and an essential upgrade for Xy-DOS users who work in any of these languages. (On
the shoulders of the Xy4 SP, the XyWWWeb U2 customization file supports real-time switching among
all of these code pages.)

If and when you decide to enter the world of 64-bit Windows, I would respectfully suggest Wengier
Wu's vDosPlus as the first DOS emulator to try (http://vdosplus.org). While he was developing it, Wengier worked
closely with the XyWrite user community to make it into a fast, customizable and dependable platform
for XyWrite-DOS running under Windows. From my perspective, the great thing about vDosPlus is that
it enables virtually seamless interoperability between Xy-DOS and the Windows operating system. Much
of my work on the XyWWWeb U2 over the last eight years has been devoted to exploiting this
capability. To the point where, in my own use of Xy4, there is virtually never any occasion to shell
to DOS; rather, I shell directly to the vastly more capable Windows cmd.exe environment. In the
process, I've harnessed the Windows scripting language AutoIt as a powerful extension of XPL. More
recently, I've been using C to create Windows utilities that interoperate with XyWrite 4. !

-- 
Carl Distefano
cld@xxxxxxxxxx