Subject:
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Re: Fixed! ($Here's the Deal$)
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.admin.general
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Date:
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Wed, 7 Aug 2002 18:21:27 GMT
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Viewed:
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400 times
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In lugnet.admin.general, Suzanne D. Rich writes:
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> I believe you've each made your feelings known on the typography issue.
> Perhaps it'd be wise to let it rest now.
>
> -Suz
I should know better, but I can't help jumping in on this. I've written a
fair amount of code that deals with character sets, so I understand the
technical issue in detail.
Chris Gray is right that every contemporary newsreader can handle ASCII
text. But Richard Noeckel isn't breaking any rules by using the ISO-8859-1
(Latin 1) superset; I bet that every newsreader written or updated in the
last five years can handle that too. But usually only Windows machines can
handle the additional characters in Codepage 1252.
ASCII dates back to the 1960s; by the late '70s, nearly all computers used
it. ASCII specifies the character codes in the range of 32 (20 hex) to 126
(7E hex). Here's a fine history of ASCII:
http://www.wps.com/texts/codes/
ISO-8859-1 is the Western European character standard, and adds character
codes in the range of 160 (A0 hex) to 255 (FF hex). Here's one history of
ISO-8859-1 from 1997:
http://www.cs.uu.nl/wais/html/na-dir/internationalization/iso-8859-1-charset.html
Windows extends ISO-8859-1 with Codepage 1252. This assigns additional
characters to some of the range from 128 (80 hex) to 159 (9F hex). Here's
one resource that shows ASCII, Latin-1 and 1252:
http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/reference/sbcs/1252.htm
One problem character that show up escaped in Chris's reader, is at hex
location 92 (octal 222), the right single quotation mark.
On most UNIX platforms, the single quote is drawn as a right single
quotation mark; on the Macintosh and Windows, it is drawn as a vertical
apostrophe. So, most word processors on the Mac and Windows replace the
vertical apostrophe with the open and closed quotes to make it look better.
(WebTV also does this -- and did before they were bought by Microsoft.)
So merely composing your message in a word processor can generate character
codes that won't necessarily display correctly everywhere.
Unfortunately, there is no way to know if the characters on the screen
belong to 1252, Latin-1 or ASCII without just knowing.
Flame throwers, please note that I did not come here to praise Richard or
blame him. I'm simply suggesting that this is not a simple issue.
Cary
And don't get me started on Unicode.
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Message has 1 Reply:
 | | Re: Fixed! ($Here's the Deal$)
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| Cary Clark wrote: <SNIPPER!> (...) Actually, it is somewhat simple. Unless Richard uses a totally bizarre System Font, all he needs to do is compose in Notepad instead of Word (honestly, who would waste the overhead of Word on NG posts when any (...) (22 years ago, 10-Aug-02, to lugnet.admin.general)
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Message is in Reply To:
| | Re: Fixed! ($Here's the Deal$)
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| [snip] I'm just stepping in here as a friendly reminder that jabs at others tend to result in unwanted arguments which can quickly get out of control. I believe you've each made your feelings known on the typography issue. Perhaps it'd be wise to (...) (22 years ago, 7-Aug-02, to lugnet.admin.general)
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