peterk@cbmger.UUCP (Peter Kittel GERMANY) (04/08/91)
In article <18f0bf14.ARN1771@prolix.pub.uu.oz.au> dac@prolix.pub.uu.oz.au writes: > > I could put all 95 characters in the ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ >lookup table >-- >{Send your flames to =Marc Barrett=, he's used to 'em} Ehm, I think here's a flame necessary: WHY THE H*LL DO YOU ONLY RECOGNIZE 95 CHARACTERS??? From my counting, the Amiga character set holds excatly double as many chars!!! And when I'm on my way: Why the h*ll are those quite normal characters always represented as dots (== non-chars) in hex dumps? Why? Let's take this to .advocacy, but let also all programmers know, that there are more things than simply considering PAL or NTSC! (You know what I really hate? Commercial fonts that cost big money and only provide those "all 95 characters". Insulting.) -- Best regards, Dr. Peter Kittel // E-Mail to \\ Only my personal opinions... Commodore Frankfurt, Germany \X/ {uunet|pyramid|rutgers}!cbmvax!cbmger!peterk
jsmoller@jsmami.UUCP (Jesper Steen Moller) (04/09/91)
In article <1080@cbmger.UUCP>, Peter Kittel GERMANY writes: > In article <18f0bf14.ARN1771@prolix.pub.uu.oz.au> dac@prolix.pub.uu.oz.au writes: > > > > I could put all 95 characters in the > ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ > >lookup table > >-- > >{Send your flames to =Marc Barrett=, he's used to 'em} > > Ehm, I think here's a flame necessary: WHY THE H*LL DO YOU ONLY RECOGNIZE > 95 CHARACTERS??? From my counting, the Amiga character set holds excatly > double as many chars!!! And when I'm on my way: Why the h*ll are those > quite normal characters always represented as dots (== non-chars) in > hex dumps? Why? Because some people think that the national ECMA chars are for fun, and that an IBM charset would have been more appropriate. Ever logged onto a BBS system without some ibm.font ? (Actually it might help in hex-dumps, as the more dots there are, the easier it is to spot text. BTW: 2.0 Type does use national chars. That's probably your idea, right? ;-) > Let's take this to .advocacy, but let also all programmers know, that > there are more things than simply considering PAL or NTSC! Even that is a problem for a lot of programs. Some just centre the screen if it's a PAL machine... > (You know what I really hate? Commercial fonts that cost big money and > only provide those "all 95 characters". Insulting.) Yeah, I recently finished the Danish fonts for ProVideo Post (I did plus some time ago... and the 3 font packs). Them chauvenist b*stards (thery're not on the net so I can discuss it with them) didn't do the _full_ Amiga character map. They use a ridiculous 26 of the 95 chars above 127, and these are only available in one version per size (unlike the fonts). I had to cut away [\] and {|} (good old trick!) to implement the Danisk chars (they cannot be used in UUCP news unfortunately...) The program is one of the best currently available, but it isn't very kind to Europeans... > Best regards, Dr. Peter Kittel // E-Mail to \\ Only my personal opinions... At least you don't have a name like M0LLER, with a national character in it. That's not funny. Try teaching an American or even a Brit how to pronounce it... Regards, Jesper -- __ Jesper Steen Moller /// VOICE: +45 31 62 46 45 Maglemosevej 52 __ /// USENET: cbmehq!cbmdeo!jsmoller DK-2920 Charl \\\/// FIDONET: 2:231/84.45 Denmark \XX/
peterk@cbmger.UUCP (Peter Kittel GERMANY) (04/09/91)
In article <18f4a5c4.ARN12b9@jsmami.UUCP> cbmehq!cbmdeo!jsmami!jsmoller (Jesper S. Moller) writes: >In article <1080@cbmger.UUCP>, Peter Kittel GERMANY writes: > >Because some people think that the national ECMA chars are for fun, >and that an IBM charset would have been more appropriate. Ever logged >onto a BBS system without some ibm.font ? > >(Actually it might help in hex-dumps, as the more dots there are, the >easier it is to spot text. BTW: 2.0 Type does use national chars. That's >probably your idea, right? ;-) Now I'm blamed. Yes, I put an enhancement request on this, but only now I realized through your mentioning it, that it has been successful! But there are still many dots in hex dumps. Let's hope they didn't omit as many chars as you mentioned. >At least you don't have a name like M0LLER, with a national character in it. >That's not funny. Try teaching an American or even a Brit how to pronounce >it... Yeah, but when I try to spell someone my name via phone, you can bet they reverse the last two letters of my past name... -- Best regards, Dr. Peter Kittel // E-Mail to \\ Only my personal opinions... Commodore Frankfurt, Germany \X/ {uunet|pyramid|rutgers}!cbmvax!cbmger!peterk
dac@prolix.pub.uu.oz.au (Andrew Clayton) (04/10/91)
In article <1080@cbmger.UUCP>, Peter Kittel GERMANY writes: > In article <18f0bf14.ARN1771@prolix.pub.uu.oz.au> dac@prolix.pub.uu.oz.au writes: > > > > I could put all 95 characters in the > ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ > >lookup table > >-- > >{Send your flames to =Marc Barrett=, he's used to 'em} > > Ehm, I think here's a flame necessary: WHY THE H*LL DO YOU ONLY RECOGNIZE > 95 CHARACTERS??? From my counting, the Amiga character set holds excatly *** Oy, I told you to flame =MB=, not me! :-( *** But, to answer your question; Of course, you are correct, there is no real reason, other than lazyness, for not recognising all the wonderful characters in the normal USA keymap, or even the international ones, and if I had a 'read the bitmap from the font' program, I could do it, I guess. But I don't. Yet. Is anyone going to answer that one? [Remember - Arexx solutions only!] Manipulating characters that are generated by deadkeys is, to my eyes, a hardship that I don't want to go through. Heck, the whole premise of the 'project' is to put a heading in a file -- so I can label listings and code with something that STANDS OUT. [The fact that I can also /easily/ generate large letters to irritate the **** out of netters is largely irrelevent :-)] Who is going to use ASCII 193 in the normal scheme of things? [Yes, lots of anal retentives out there will pick up obscure examples where such vacuosity is required, but I expect that, and snub them beforehand!] [Offhand, I don't know what ASCII 193 even is :-)] > double as many chars!!! And when I'm on my way: Why the h*ll are those > quite normal characters always represented as dots (== non-chars) in > hex dumps? Why? Those things with accents, graves, and umlauts on them? Removing all that extraneous data makes [the ascii part of] dumps easier to read! Obviously! > Let's take this to .advocacy, but let also all programmers know, that > there are more things than simply considering PAL or NTSC! Oh, ok. [See, I can be reasonable]. Dac --
peterk@cbmger.UUCP (Peter Kittel GERMANY) (04/11/91)
In article <18f73ee5.ARN18a5@prolix.pub.uu.oz.au> dac@prolix.pub.uu.oz.au writes: >In article <1080@cbmger.UUCP>, Peter Kittel GERMANY writes: > >> Ehm, I think here's a flame necessary: WHY THE H*LL DO YOU ONLY RECOGNIZE >> 95 CHARACTERS??? From my counting, the Amiga character set holds excatly > > and if I had a 'read the bitmap from the font' >program, I could do it, I guess. But I don't. Yet. Is anyone going to answer >that one? [Remember - Arexx solutions only!] Sorry, not yet ARexx literate. In AmigaBasic: FOR i=2 to 15:IF i=8 then i=10 ' skip Ctrl chars PRINT i,:FOR j=0 to 15:PRINT CHR$(i*16+j);" ";:NEXT:PRINT:NEXT >Manipulating characters that are generated by deadkeys is, to my eyes, a >hardship that I don't want to go through. You don't need to consider dead keys. You just design the final accented chars. And thus things get really easy: For most of these MSB chars, you can duplicate the entry for one pure char with MSB==0 and simply add a little accent or umlaut to it, easy! >Who is going to use ASCII 193 in the normal scheme of things? Well, it's like all those security checks in a program: Were you *really* able to allocate those 16 bytes? Many people don't check for such little things, but one day, on a special situation: poof! >[Offhand, I don't know what ASCII 193 even is :-)] From AmigaBasic manual, appendix A: it's a capital A with aigu accent. >Those things with accents, graves, and umlauts on them? Removing all that >extraneous data makes [the ascii part of] dumps easier to read! Obviously! ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ ^^^^^^ AAARRRRGGH!!! 1. The "other" part is also ascii, 2. I find it more readable when there are not suddenly holes in plain text. -- Best regards, Dr. Peter Kittel // E-Mail to \\ Only my personal opinions... Commodore Frankfurt, Germany \X/ {uunet|pyramid|rutgers}!cbmvax!cbmger!peterk
urjlew@uncecs.edu (Rostyk Lewyckyj) (04/21/91)
In article <1080@cbmger.UUCP>, peterk@cbmger.UUCP (Peter Kittel GERMANY) writes: > In article <18f0bf14.ARN1771@prolix.pub.uu.oz.au> dac@prolix.pub.uu.oz.au writes: > > > > I could put all 95 characters in the > ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ > >lookup table > >-- > > Ehm, I think here's a flame necessary: WHY THE H*LL DO YOU ONLY RECOGNIZE > 95 CHARACTERS??? From my counting, the Amiga character set holds excatly > double as many chars!!! And when I'm on my way: Why the h*ll are those > quite normal characters always represented as dots (== non-chars) in > hex dumps? Why? > > > (You know what I really hate? Commercial fonts that cost big money and > only provide those "all 95 characters". Insulting.) > Well as we all know almost the whole world except for IBM decided some 30 years ago to go with the ASCII-7bit character set. IBM had proposed an 8 bit extended character set based on the 7 bit ASCII character set to USASI (later renamed to ASCII). It was not accepted. IBM itself was forced by its major customers to introduce the 8 bit EBCDIC exension of the old 6 bit BCD code. The reason being that there was no easy conversion path from BCD to ASCII, and the customers had a large investment in existing data files. Anyways IBM went EBCDIC and the rest went 7 bit ASCII. Well 7 bits is 128 characters which is divied up to 32 control chars., X'7F' the rub-out character (for paper tape), and 95 characters for remaining uses. After all - who would ever need more :-) :-). All those eight bit combination are not really valid characters. The valid characters are embedded in the low order 7 bit positions of each 8 bit byte, with a 0 high order bit. Perhaps it's time to standardize on a larger character set, hopefully with an extension escape hatch, hopefully more useable than the shift in SI and shift out SO characters provided in ASCII. Now does that dowse your flames? Please excuse the long tirade. I would have left it at the one line quip about 7 bit ASCII But I need to satisfy the posting software restrictions for folllowups. ----------------------------------------------- Reply-To: Rostyslaw Jarema Lewyckyj urjlew@uncmvs.acs.unc.edu (ARPA,SURA,NSF etc. internet) or urjlew@unc.bitnet or urjlew@ecsvax.UUCP tel. (919)-962-6501
peter@sugar.hackercorp.com (Peter da Silva) (04/22/91)
In article <1991Apr21.050018.20966@uncecs.edu> urjlew@uncecs.edu (Rostyk Lewyckyj) writes: > Well as we all know almost the whole world except for IBM decided > some 30 years ago to go with the ASCII-7bit character set. Actually, in Europe they went with ISO646, a common set of character sets that is largely the same as ASCII but has a number of optional letters that differ by country to allow you to use national characters with diacriticals like umlauts, accents, etc. > Perhaps it's time to standardize on a larger character set It's been done: ISO 8859.1, which is what the Amiga uses. A STANDARD 8-bit character set. > I would have left it at the one line quip about 7 bit ASCII Well, that's the whole point. The Amiga uses a standard 8-bit character set, and your tirade demonstrates why people are tired of people who don't know what it's all about... -- Peter da Silva. `-_-' <peter@sugar.hackercorp.com>.
peterk@cbmger.UUCP (Peter Kittel GERMANY) (04/22/91)
In article <1991Apr21.050018.20966@uncecs.edu> urjlew@uncecs.edu (Rostyk Lewyckyj) writes: >In article <1080@cbmger.UUCP>, peterk@cbmger.UUCP (Peter Kittel GERMANY) writes: >> In article <18f0bf14.ARN1771@prolix.pub.uu.oz.au> dac@prolix.pub.uu.oz.au writes: >> > >> > I could put all 95 characters in the >> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ >> >lookup table >> >-- >> >> Ehm, I think here's a flame necessary: WHY THE H*LL DO YOU ONLY RECOGNIZE >> 95 CHARACTERS??? From my counting, the Amiga character set holds excatly >> double as many chars!!! And when I'm on my way: Why the h*ll are those >> quite normal characters always represented as dots (== non-chars) in >> hex dumps? Why? >> >Well as we all know almost the whole world except for IBM decided >some 30 years ago to go with the ASCII-7bit character set. And some 10 years ago the whole world found they couldn't neglect the markets in non-english countries and provided 8-bit character sets. All different ones, though :-( >All those eight bit combination are not really valid characters. Come on, WAKE UP! We live in 1991 here, not in stone-age EBCDIC days! >Perhaps it's time to standardize on a larger character set, hopefully >with an extension escape hatch, hopefully more useable than the >shift in SI and shift out SO characters provided in ASCII. Boy, you obviously didn't read the thread about international character sets some weeks ago. There are many attempts for standardization going on. The Amiga characterset follows a standard, the ISO one (the "I" stands for international! :-). And why that extension cripple? Every computer I know today (yes, also the UNIX boxes) rely on memory organised in 8-bit bytes or multiples of them. Why not use that MSB? WHY? -- Best regards, Dr. Peter Kittel // E-Mail to \\ Only my personal opinions... Commodore Frankfurt, Germany \X/ {uunet|pyramid|rutgers}!cbmvax!cbmger!peterk