[WinMac] ASCII is not ASCII

Harris, Matt(HARRISMA[at]Mattel.com)
Mon, 21 Sep 1998 17:31:16 -0700

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        " Will someone please explain to me the difference between "Mac"
text and
> "DOS" text? I always thought that ASCII was ASCII and, well, that was
> that. It does not appear to be the case, however." Romeyn Prescott
>
        "You are quite correct, ASCII is ASCII :)
        It is how the -lines end- which differs,
        Mac uses CR. I don't remember what DOS uses, maybe CR and a LF
(line feed)
        and I think UNIX uses just the LF." Mike Rehbein

[Harris, Matt] [Harris, Matt] ASCII is definitely not ASCII.
I just had to correct this. ASCII codes 1-128 are identical. Those
codes include all upper and lower case letters, spaces, returns, tabs,
and much of the commonly used punctuation. 129 to 256 are totally
different. This includes characters like 1/4 on PC which map to a
ligature (Fl) on the Mac. The copyright symbol and trademark symbol
also move. Some programs such as Illustrator and Word endeavor to
correct the problem, but in some cases there is not an easy answer.
Ligatures for example do not exist in standard ASCII on the PC.

You can check this out by using Fontographer, which will save a
font file as a Mac font, or reencode the same file to save as a PC font.

One interesting extra tidbit is that PC ASCII shows characters
above 256 (all the way up to the 700's). Certain applications can
access these characters, but I am not certain how to put characters in
this space in Fontographer. Most high quality commercial PC fonts have
things like ligatures at these High ASCII codes If anyone could explain
how this is handled, I would appreciate it.

As far as CF and LF, I think there is a difference, but I am not
sure how much trouble it causes since it is not a problem for the
thousands of files we deal with going between 95, NT, and Mac(while the
ASCII stuff is a real headache).

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