Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watmath!att!att!emory!gatech!bloom-beacon!eru!hagbard!sunic!isgate!krafla!einari From: einari@rhi.hi.is (Einar Indridason) Newsgroups: comp.os.msdos.programmer Subject: Re: Supporting international character sets Message-ID: <2325@krafla.rhi.hi.is> Date: 23 Oct 90 17:00:24 GMT References: <3866@rossignol.Princeton.EDU> Reply-To: einari@rhi.hi.is (Einar Indridason) Organization: University of Iceland (RHI) Lines: 37 In article <3866@rossignol.Princeton.EDU> tr@samadams.princeton.edu (Tom Reingold) writes: >through 255 give the alternate characters, e.g. 132 is lower case 'a' >with umlaut. Does this mean that when the user hits his key marked >with that letter than the application thinks he hit an ASCII 132? What >about scan codes for these keyboards? Are charts available? Or are >the keyboards the same with different key caps? The answer is that it depends on the application program. Some programs are written by STUPID authors that MASK the 8th bit. I hate it!!!!!!!!!! Especially since sometimes it is more work to MASK it than to leave it alone! Here in Iceland (and you Americans, note that down), we *must* use additionally 10 lower case characters and 10 upper case characters that are not part of ASCII. They are however part of ISO 8859/1, codepage 861 and 850 from IBM for the PC/AT machines (and part of the Macintosh I think?) For example DBase II, III, III+ doesn't allow us to use the big THorn. Instead it sees EOF and quits. Wordstar used (and maybe still does) the 8th bit to say: "print space, mask the 8th bit and print that character". WordPerfect does accept our characters, but it represents them in a special way. (It accept our characters, which is more than could be said about some other programs!!!) The Borland stuff usually behaves well about our 'special characters' PROGRAMMERS: UNITE. **DON'T** MASK THE 8TH BIT!!! -- Internet: einari@rhi.hi.is | "Just give me my command line and throw UUCP: ..!mcsun!isgate!rhi!einari | the GUIs in the waste basket!!!!" General Surgeons warning: Masking the 8th bit can seriously damage your brain!!