Hi, Alexander!  Awhile ago you wrote in a message to Ardith Hinton:

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


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



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



ak>  All your examples with extended characters are skipped
ak>  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:

 ak>>     N: 130 (Hex: 82) é
 AH>             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....  :-)



ak>  My fidonet gate ddt.demos.su goes crazy when it processes
ak>  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....  ;-)



ak>  So, I see "e acute" as a Russian letter which looks like
ak>  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....  :-))



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