Date: Mon, 31 Mar 1997 19:05:25 -0800 (PST) From: Annelise Anderson <andrsn@andrsn.stanford.edu> To: mike allison <mallison@konnections.com> Cc: Whiz-Kidz <whiz-kidz@pcisys.net>, freebsd-doc@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Handbook in ascii Message-ID: <Pine.BSI.3.94.970331184007.14849A-100000@andrsn.stanford.edu> In-Reply-To: <3341C4A0.241D83@konnections.com>
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On Tue, 1 Apr 1997, mike allison wrote: > Those are definitely ASCII characters, just looks like a value, as far > as sheer numbers go. Leaves a bit to be desired in readability. All > those eXXXXXXXXtra lettttttters are definitely DDiissttrraaccttiinngg. > > > -MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMmmike > Yes, they're all ascii. But I believe that the definition of an ascii document is that it contains nothing that isn't ascii--no control codes, for example. I don't think handbook.latin1 qualifies. latin1 (iso-latin-8859-1) is one of many character sets; and various document formats can use latin1, e.g., many html documents are latin1 and are encoded with html. Netscape reads latin1 by default. I think it's important to have the handbook and other documentation available in plain ascii so that it can be printed out; matters of installation, printing, configuring a kernel, and so forth are too complicated to be read on a screen and remembered (at least for me). I doubt that there are very many characters in the handbook (or the FAQ) above ascii 127. To the extent that there are, they may neither display nor print correctly in dos/Windows. The default character set for dos and Windows 3.1 and Windows 95 is Microsoft code page 437. This code page (character set) is not the same as latin1, except, of course, for the first 128 characters. The character set differs somewhat and so does the "location" of the characters, that is, the decimal equivalents. The default code page "comes with your hardware," as Microsoft says. In other words, it's on a chip. Unless to take measures to change it, that's what you've got--whether your pc runs dos/Win or FreeBSD. One available code page is 850, which is the default (hardware code page) on pc's sold in Europe and French-speaking Canada. However, code page 850 is not the same as iso-latin-8859-1. Although I think one can find somewhere on the net a 8859-1 code page for dos, it's not readily available. I know how to change code pages in dos and Windows 3.1, but 95 does not offer the code page as an explicit choice; it seems to select the code page it considers appropriate. The consequence of an "ascii" version of the handbook (which is of course available on the cdrom) is that all the typographical conventions available with postscript or html (or even rich text format) for bold, italic, and so forth that are used to indicate text to be replaced or what gets typed (versus, say, the command prompt) is lost. This seems to be to be an important consideration in writing documentation. AAnnnneelliissee :) :)
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