[can.francais] 8-bit fonts

fortin@zap.UUCP (Denis Fortin) (03/22/88)

In article <3aa84fac.b8ab@apollo.uucp> rees@apollo.uucp (Jim Rees) writes:
>I've been playing around with 8-bit fonts, specifically Latin-1 fonts.
>The uucp transport layer is 8-bit transparent, and so is readnews.
>If you make one small change to inews, you can use 8-bit fonts too
>(assuming your system supports them).  

>It's kind of neat to read through
>news articles and see all the accent marks on French names.
                                                       '
Hmmm.  It's more than neat...  For people up here in Quebec, it's actually 
quite useful and interesting.

>How widespread and how standard is Latin-1 for expression of international
>characters?  Someone from Europe want to comment?

Well, this is not Europe, but a group of people around here are starting
to toy with the idea of exchanging news and mail locally in ISO-Latin-1.
A special header (X-Character-Set: ISO-Latin-1 ???  Any other suggestions???)
would be used and the news would be translated to whatever character set
the local machine uses when it is displayed (for example, on an IBM PC-type
of machine or a DEC VT-220, you can represent some of the ISO-Latin-1 
characters).

Not being able to put accents in texts is a real pain when you're typing
texts in French: a bit like typing English without descenders (imagine:
it would be ouite oainful to have to oet bu without descenders :-).
            q     p                  g    y

(Oh, by the way, Microsoft Windows uses ISO-Latin-1 internally.)

>Rn apprently strips the high bit somewhere.  I haven't delved into it yet.

Sigh.  Hopefully there's a quick fix.

> But here's the fix for inews (your line numbers will vary):

Thanks.
-- 
Denis Fortin                            | fortin@zap.UUCP
CAE Electronics Ltd                     | philabs!micomvax!zap!fortin
The opinions expressed above are my own | fortin%zap.uucp@uunet.uu.net