• Is it readable? (1)

    From Ardith Hinton@1:153/716 to alexander koryagin on Fri Mar 2 18:00:57 2018
    Hi, Alexander! Awhile ago you wrote in a message to Ardith Hinton:

    I have to say that characters sets are different around
    the world. Number and Latin chars are the same, but when
    you want to type acute symbols (French for instance) no
    guarantee that the people across the pond will see them
    correctly.


    Uh-huh. That's why I named the accent marks I used there.... :-)



    The system works in the following way. You send your
    message in US/Canada OEM charset. In Russia we transform
    your charset to KOI-8r. This Russian charset is a modified
    American one, but we have a smaller number of specials
    symbols because we replaced many of them with Russian
    alphabet symbols. Therefore, some extended symbols
    (which you see as pseudographic, acute, circumflex)
    we see as Russian letters.


    And when you folks type Russian letters I see fractions, upside down question marks, etc. I also see many weird & wonderful variations on the name of a certain individual from Sweden regardless of where the authors come from.

    Late flash:

    "Speak of the devil (and he may appear)!" Hi, Bj”rn.... ;-)



    All your examples with extended characters are skipped
    because I have problem sending back my answer.


    Understood. I can't help noticing, however, that in your experiment with DOS test symbols you were able to use the very same characters. I simply copied the numbers you had used & got exactly the same results. The following line is one which I quoted from your original message:

    N: 130 (Hex: 82) ‚
    e acute

    You sent it to David in echomail... I understood & quoted it... you understood my quote, then you successfully requoted it. In other experiments of my own I have found that a person using a character set which is incompatible with mine can't quote back to me the accent marks I've used. Hmm.... :-)



    My fidonet gate ddt.demos.su goes crazy when it processes
    such messages and refuses to send them. ;-)


    Perhaps because of the frequency with which I used the accent marks? You seem to be able to get away with using one per line.... ;-)



    So, I see "e acute" as a Russian letter which looks like
    English "B" (but sounds as "V").


    Ah, yes. "BoAky" (the best approximation I can easily come up with) does sound pretty much like "Vodka" to me.... :-))



    Using UTF-8 you can print words from all languages in
    one message. But you must have software which supports
    UTF-8.


    So I gather. It's all very well for those who are starting out from scratch, and it may indeed be the wave of the future. But I don't expect "Joe Bloggs", who has had a DOS box running flawlessly in the basement for the past twenty years, to feel inspired by what for him could be an extreme makeover... regardless of how many other people believe his system is hopelessly outdated.

    Seems to me you can use N 32-255, when necessary, in such a way that everybody in Z1 & Z3 who responded to your test understood what you meant even if the colours were reversed or they couldn't duplicate what they saw. But it may be too much work sometimes for what you get out of it. I can see Cyrillic characters if I switch message editors. If only I'd known, when Dallas & were beta testing timEd... timEd doesn't give us the option of using your alphabet. The best alternative we've found so far doesn't allow me to quote something in Russian & then ask beginner-level questions in English, unless perhaps there's a toggle I don't know about which allows me to change horses in mid-stream. I often see Russians doing that, however. Ahh! Okay... so how would you do it?




    --- timEd/386 1.10.y2k+
    * Origin: Wits' End, Vancouver CANADA (1:153/716)
  • From Ardith Hinton@1:153/716 to Benny Pedersen on Fri Mar 2 18:00:57 2018
    Hi & welcome, Benny! Recently you wrote in a message to [blank line]:

    "Speak of the devil (and he may appear)!"
    Hi, Bj”rn.... ;-)

    :LOL: it worked! :LOL:

    Even on Android with utf-8 @)


    Yes, you were able to quote Bj”rn's name as I'd typed it & send it back to me unaltered. However... it seems that Mark, using the same character set I'm using, received an overcorrection. In the past I have found LATIN-1 2 (which you used in this message) quite compatible with my IBMPC 2.

    I've been keeping notes about what happens to certain accent marks in Fidomail etc. for awhile, BTW, and yours is the first example I've observed in which UTF-anything worked AFAIC. Whew! This stuff is far more complicated than I'd realized initially. Anyway, thanks for your input.... :-))




    --- timEd/386 1.10.y2k+
    * Origin: Wits' End, Vancouver CANADA (1:153/716)