On Tue, 28 Dec 2004 08:56:13 +0100, Philip Newton
<philip.newton@...> wrote:

> 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.

Oh, gosh. I hadn't considered CP 850. Thanks!
Btw, the 386 machine I used routinely some time back was MS DOS-based; I
installed Codepage 819, which is identical to Latin-1. With CP819, you do
lose the nice box-drawing graphics, resulting in some pretty ratty-looking
displays at times, but the Latin-1 capability more than made up for that
loss.

CP819 will be rejected by ordinary MS-DOS; a few modified instructions
allowed it to be used, along with other codepages for ISO-8859-n, n up to
10, iirc. Kosta Kostis did the honors.

Thanks, too, for the other information and comments.

Regards,

--
Nicholas Bodley /*|*\ Waltham, Mass.
The curious hermit -- autodidact and polymath
http://www.iht.com/articles/2004/12/26/opinion/edherb.html