Re: how to display character from 128-159 range

On Dec 11, 7:00 pm, dic...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Thomas E. Dickey)
wrote:
James Kanze <james.ka...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

This part of ISO/IEC 8859 specifies a set of 191
coded graphic characters identified as Latin
alphabet No. 1.

That'll teach me to trust Wikipedia:-). I'd forgotten that
the actual ISO 8859 standard doesn't define the control
characters. (According to the Wikipedia, it is ISO-8859-1
which defined the control characters as well. With
ISO-8859-1 being the Internet standard, and ISO 8859-1 being
the ISO standard. Or something like that.)

Wikipedia has a lot of errors (too many to list here),
but it's useful as a starting point.

Agreed. And it's fun, and it has a lot of information which
isn't readily available elsewhere, too. (Not the case here, of
course.)

And to be fair, the Wikipedia article was actually fairly
complete and accurate; I just scrolled down to the bottom to see
the code chart; the article actually did say that it was the
IANA registered character map, with the "preferred MIME name of
ISO-8859-1 (note the extra hyphen over ISO 8859-1), a superset
of ISO 8859-1, for use on the Internet."

It does seem odd to separate the sets of graphic characters
and the control sequences into separate standards - but
considering that most of the variations would be implemented
by a table-lookup for fonts, and the control-sequences would
be a program, I guess it's a reasonable split.

The problem is that there are a number of different standards,
all somewhat overlapping and referring to one another. RFC
1345 does define the control characters, and gives latin1 as one
of the aliases for the name. (I don't know why Wikipedia says
it is the "preferred" alias; the formal name is
"ISO_8859-1:1987", and there are several aliases which appear
before ISO-8859-1.)

The ISO standards defined codepages which (mostly...) use the
values 160-255, as extensions to 7-bit ASCII. There are other
codepages than the ISO-8859-x ones - and some used the range
128-255.

Just a nit, but isn't the term "codepages" an IBMism, carried
over from the IBM-PC into Windows? I've never heard the term
outside of the Windows world.

it does seem to be IBM jargon, but the way the bits are
treated is the same (also see ISO-2022). OP was referring to
a Windows machine.

Yes. I just wanted to make sure that my prejudices were right,
that words like "character set" or "encoding" were in more
general use.

But of course common usage equates the character set to the
combined ASCII plus codepage. However, the context of OP's
question was regarding some confusion of "Latin" with a
codepage, so I focused on that.

I think that the original poster did have some confusion
about what encoding was involved. And I'm not really sure
what he wants---to me, latin1 is a synonym for ISO 8859-1,
or ISO-8859-1, or whatever. With the C1 control characters,
which is what is expected when the mime encoding type is
specified to be latin 1.

Perhaps OP was reading some menu entry that claimed it was
"Latin 1". I recall reading comments about some codes that
are mapped into the C1 range (Microsoft's "smart quotes" do
this for instance, and are a nuisance even in email from
organizations that I would like to assume are technically
competent...).

Probably. I had originally supposed that he was expecting some
printable characters, but then he said something about control
codes or control characters.

At any rate, one can go nuts trying to keep all this stuff
straight. Ideally, I'd say just use UTF-8, and forget about the
rest, but we can't efface history.

--
James Kanze (GABI Software) email:james.kanze@xxxxxxxxx
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