On Friday, Jan 03, 2003, at 04:14AM, david.bircumshaw <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>HI Roger, Chris
>
>yup, character map and the opportunity to insert symbols exists but it is an
>extremely tedious process if required repeatedly. I've been having a look on
>the Web about these issues, going back to 1963 and the invention of the
>originally 127-bit ASCII set (yes, 127, the extra bit was added as a spare)
>and extended character sets and conversions between hex and decimal and
>problems between Windows and Macs and I must confess the only result was a
>severe headache.
>
It really depends on what software you expect will be displaying the text. If that software is HTML capable, you should use the html extended character set (http://www.tower.org/smithy/ASCII.html --different from both Mac and Windows), and that will appear correctly no matter what the OS. If you can produce PDF files (trivial on a Mac with OS X and not too difficult most Unix or Linux systems, requires expensive software in Classic Mac OS or Windows whatever) use what ever works on your machine and let the PDF format engine take care of it (I think). If you expect your readers will be using ordinary text or word processors, you're probably out of luck if you want to be completely cross-platform.
There is hope on the horizon. Unicode characters are 16-bit for pretty complete coverage of non-Western alphabets and other characters. Most modern OS's are capable of producing Unicode, though as yet not much software in Western countries is written to take advantage of it. Many fonts, for instance, need to be reworked.
BTW--the original ASCII was 6-bit: 64 characters, 0x00 to 0x3F, which maps to 7-bit ASCII's 0x20 to 0x5F (space bar to left arrow, including only upper-case characters, numerals, and some punctuation marks. No control characters but the up and left arrows.)
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