Re: Non-ASCII (Was: Re: German handwriting)

On Tue, 28 Dec 2004 02:28:42 -0500, Nicholas Bodley
<nbodley@...> wrote:

>
> On Sat, 25 Dec 2004 08:24:53 -0000, caeruleancentaur
> <caeruleancentaur@...> wrote:
>
> > I tried to use the a-e ligature using Alt-145, but it wouldn't work.
> That's a single quote left, if you mean a decimal 145, in MS-specific
> Win-1252 encoding.

Alt-145 (and Alt-mnn in general, for m != 0) is, for historical
reasons, not Win-1252 but codepage 850 -- the codepage used in MS-DOS
(itself a superset, as regards letters, of codepage 437, which was
originally used). In that codepage, position 145 is indeed an a-e
ligature.

> Try Alt-0230.

Alt-0nnn, in contrast, uses Win-1252 (or possibly the default codepage
of the Windows installation, I don't know -- since mine uses
Win-1252), where 230 is a-e lig.

> However, ASCII is only the 7-bit
> set of characters used for English and (afaik) some Malay languages, incl.
> Bahasa Indonesia.

Possibly also Latin. Though Latin is sometimes written macrons and
breves, and even English often uses non-ASCII letters in borrowed
words (especially in formal styles) such as résumé, naïve, and
encyclopædia.

Cheers,
--
Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>