RE: [WinMac] ASCII is not ASCII mea culpa

Harris, Matt(HARRISMA[at]Mattel.com)
Thu, 24 Sep 1998 08:37:20 -0700

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Another clarification I received was that ASCII is coded 0 to 127 not 1
to 128.

Since every Mac font I have includes extended ASCII and many of the
characters contained in extended ACSII appear throughout my documents, I
considered ASCII to include all text in a font. My point was that if
you trust your text to remain the same when a file is moved from Mac to
PC you will get stung. Someone must check to make sure nothing weird
happened.

I appreciate you taking the time to correct my error.

Rather than saying ASCII is ASCII I should have said Mac Fonts don't map
characters to the same codes as PC fonts. Until Unicode, there is no
easy solution to that as far as I have found.

Matt

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Leonard Rosenthol [SMTP:leonardr@Adobe.COM]
> Sent: Tuesday, September 22, 1998 7:44 PM
> Subject: Re: [WinMac] ASCII is not ASCII
>
> At 5:31 PM -0700 9/21/98, Harris, Matt wrote:
> > [Harris, Matt] [Harris, Matt] ASCII is definitely not ASCII.
> >I just had to correct this.
> >
> Well, don't mind if I correct you...
>
>
>
> >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.
> >
> Correct - and that's all that ASCII defines, the 7bit character
> space. Anything above 128 is NOT ASCII.
>
>
> >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.
> >
> Correct. This is known as "Extended ASCII".
>
>
> > One interesting extra tidbit is that PC ASCII shows characters
> >above 256 (all the way up to the 700's).
> >
> You're thinking about code pages, which is a whole nother beast
> all
> together. And in that case, also starts to map to things like script
> codes
> on the Mac.
>
>
> > 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).
> >
> MacOS uses CR (carriage return = ASCII 13 (0x0D)) for the line
> termination character, while the PC uses both a CR and an LF (line
> feed =
> ASCII 10 (0x0A)). Depending on the text editor in use on a given
> platform,
> you may get little boxes in your text and lines that don't wrap :(.
>
>
> Leonard
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> ------
> Leonard Rosenthol <mailto:leonardr@adobe.com>
> Designated Free Electron (612) 766-4718 (Minn)
> Adobe Systems Incorporated (215) 233-5270 (Philly)
>
> PGP Fingerprint: 8CC9 8878 921E C627 0BC1 15BB FC19 64A9 0016 1397
>

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