[LMB] (chat) two new foreign editions

[James Burbidge]

On 31/10/06, Peter H. Granzeau <pgranzeau at cox.net> wrote:
> At 11:31 PM 10/30/2006, Melissa Siah wrote:
> >Herself said:
> >>/La Chasse Sacree /is the title in French (with
> >>an accent over the second-to-last e that my computer would doubtless
> >>supply me if I knew which button to push, but in the meanwhile, just
> >>imagine it.)
> >>
> >>     Ta, L.
> >
> >(On Windows) I use the Num Lock and hold down
> >Alt while pressing in sequence the digits 1, 3 and 0. Result: é
> >
> >It's only the commoner accented characters that
> >I can actually remember though.  The more
> >obscure ones take a whole lot of random guessing and sometimes cursing.
> >
> >Agnes - where do I find this character map?
>
> The problem is not creating a character (e acute,
> in this case), it is displaying it on systems
> that are not running Windows.  I believe Linux
> insists on a seven bit ASCII character set, so
> none of those characters with diacritical marks will display in a Linux system.
>

Linux, as an operating system, has no particular relevance to the type
of character encoding displayed by an application.

My linux system supports various applications which have full Unicode
support.  Some older applications may not have support for anything
beyond strict ASCII; most UNIX applications these days will support at
least eight-bit ISO versions, and have ever since the days of the DEC
character sets which preceded and influenced the ISO sets (via VT
terminal support).

There are non-standard characters which Windows applications use and
which are not supported by other systems (like "smart" quotation
marks).  These are a problem with Microsoft not following standards.
However, they do not include the various accented characters in the
ISO encodings, or indeed any of the alphabets supported under Unicode,
which _are_ standards-compliant.

James