Re: [WinMac] ASCII is not ASCII

ray weisling(fire.mountain[at]post1.com)
Fri, 25 Sep 1998 12:01:32 +0700

Topic thread (by Leonard Rosenthol and others) included:

|>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".
|

While "Extended ASCII" may be a good description (since it certainly isn't
ASCII), and it extends ASCII to double the codespace, a better name would
describe the different platform mappings in common use. So "Mac Character
Set" or "Win Character Set" might be more appropriate, since they're
obviously different.

Perhaps someone can explain the difference between DOS and Windows. Some
years ago I had a job to edit some files made in Microsoft Word 4 (DOS).
Moving these even to Win 3.1 (Windows Word 1 I think) resulted in some
characters changing. Maybe it was a codepage problem, since the text was in
German. But I hunted for explanations at that time and didn't get very far.
I was dealing with three different character sets, in trying to move files
from DOS to a Mac and then back to Windows for the client (besides
translating some parts to English). It was very frustrating indeed.

Ray Weisling
Jakarta

http://www.post1.com/~fire.mountain
  mailto:fire.mountain@post1.com

 The aim of science is not to open the door to infinite wisdom,
 but to set a limit to infinite error. -- Bertolt Brecht

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This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0b2 on Thu Sep 24 1998 - 22:59:20 PDT