Extended ASCII for users
Nightfox
ASCII characters. I'm not sure if this is due to user preference or
Synchronet's terminal detection. Today I noticed a user create a new account
on my BBS, and extended ASCII was disabled for him. I saw him enable extended
ASCII in his preferences, but then turned it off. I think some of the things
on my BBS look a little ugly when converted to regular ASCII characters.. I
thought all BBS telnet software would support extended ASCII characters - so
I'd guess that some users aren't using BBS-specific telnet clients. I'd like
my BBS to look good for all users - but is this something I should really be
concerned about?
Nightfox
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mro
.,: This is something about Extended ASCII for users,
Nightfox said it to All on Sat May 14 2011 11:48 am
--ДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДД-ДДДД---ДДДДДДДДДДДДДДД---ДДДДДДДДД--ДДДДДДДД
> thought all BBS telnet software would support extended ASCII characters - so
> I'd guess that some users aren't using BBS-specific telnet clients. I'd lik
> concerned about?
he's using a goofy client.
dont worry about it.
i would recommend a decent client instead of worrying about changing your
bbs.
Deuce
Re: Extended ASCII for users
By: Nightfox to All on Sat May 14 2011 11:48 am
> I've noticed that for some users on my BBS, Synchronet doesn't display
> extended ASCII characters. I'm not sure if this is due to user preference
> or Synchronet's terminal detection. Today I noticed a user create a new
It's a direct respons from the users during sign-up.
> ASCII characters.. I thought all BBS telnet software would support
> extended ASCII characters - so I'd guess that some users aren't using
> BBS-specific telnet clients. I'd like my BBS to look good for all users -
> but is this something I should really be concerned about?
Most telnet and SSH software does *not* support IBM codepage 437 (ie: "Extended
ASCII"). However, most North American BBS software does (others use other code
pages).
There is unlimited amount of room for worry here, but you should only worry if
a bunch of your users get the question wrong (and then, just fix your signup
procedure).
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Nightfox
Re: Extended ASCII for users
> > extended ASCII characters - so I'd guess that some users aren't using
> > BBS-specific telnet clients. I'd like my BBS to look good for all users
> > but is this something I should really be concerned about?
> Most telnet and SSH software does *not* support IBM codepage 437 (ie: "Exten
> ASCII"). However, most North American BBS software does (others use other c
> pages).
Interesting.. This user said he's from Germany. But I thought the ASCII
character set was pretty much universal, at least for IBM PCs, no matter the
country. The full 256 characters of ASCII was designed to support accented
letters found in non-English languages, and some of those characters are above
127, in the "high" region of ASCII.
Nightfox
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mro
.,: This is something about Extended ASCII for users,
--ДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДД-ДДДД---ДДДДДДДДДДДДДДД---ДДДДДДДДД--ДДДДДДДД
> Interesting.. This user said he's from Germany. But I thought the ASCII
> character set was pretty much universal, at least for IBM PCs, no matter the
> country. The full 256 characters of ASCII was designed to support accented
> letters found in non-English languages, and some of those characters are abo
just tell the guy to use a decent client.
Deuce
Re: Extended ASCII for users
> > Most telnet and SSH software does *not* support IBM codepage 437 (ie:
> > "Exten ASCII"). However, most North American BBS software does (others
> > use other c pages).
>
> Interesting.. This user said he's from Germany. But I thought the ASCII
> character set was pretty much universal, at least for IBM PCs, no matter
> the country. The full 256 characters of ASCII was designed to support
> accented letters found in non-English languages, and some of those
> characters are above 127, in the "high" region of ASCII.
CP437 (the "universal" one you're thinking of) is built into most video cards.
Starting with EGA (or maybe CGA?) these could be replaced however, and DOS 3.30
came with a wide array of them. When you installed DOS, it asked what country
you were in, and configured the codepage based on that. Windows continues this
practice (though Canada only uses CP863 for French installs now).
Here's the table for MS-DOS 5.0:
======================================================
Country Country Keyboard Default Alternate
Code Code Code Code
Page Page
======================================================
Belgium 032 BE 850 437
(hardware)
Brazil 055 BR 850 437
Canada 002 CF 863 850
(French) (hardware)
Czechoslovakia 042 SL 852 850
(Czech)
Denmark 045 DK 850 465
Finland 358 SU 850 437
France 033 FR 850 437
Germany 049 GR 850 437
Hungary 036 HU 852 850
International 061 437 850
English
Italy 039 IT 850 437
Latin America 003 LA 850 437
Netherlands 031 NL 850 437
Norway 047 NO 852 850
Poland 048 PL 850 437
Portugal 351 PO 850 860
(hardware)
Spain 034 SP 850 437
Sweden 046 SV 850 437
Switzerland 041 SF 850 437
(French)
Switzerland 041 SG 850 437
(German)
United 044 UK 437 850
Kingdom
United States 001 US 437 850
Yugoslavia 038 YU 852 850
As you can see, the default German codepage is CP850 - you can view it here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cp850 basically, the mixed single/double line
drawing chars are missing (double and single are still there) and some of the
greek letters are gone (no pi for example).
This is not a serious problem for *english* countries as you can see they all
use CP437 as the primary. I think that newer DOS/Windows programs use CP858
though because it has the euro sign.
So, to sum up, you only need to be concered when you have users from
non-english countries using your (most likely) english BBS. If you want to
support them, you just need to trim your extended ASCII usage down to whatever
subset is common among the codepages you want to support. Generally, doun't
use the mixed single/double line drawing characters or any accented/foreign
letters and it should be fine.
SyncTERM supports CP850 as "Codepage 850 Multilingual Latin I" when in a
graphics mode (via CTRL-F) so you can try it out and see what it looks like.
ISO 8859-1 and Windows-1252 are also widely used in Europe, but have no line
drawing characters at all. ISO 8859-1 is also supported by SyncTERM, so
bascially, only the low ASCII is "safe" to use worldwide. The question of if
you should care or not though is one you need to answer for yourself.
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Deuce
Re: Extended ASCII for users
> just tell the guy to use a decent client.
It's not the clients fault. SyncTERM is the only one I'm aware of which
completely ignore the OSs country settings and blindly forces CP437 by default
(and then only in *some* output modes). SyncTERM doing this is actually
*incorrect* behaviour, so any decent client will actually *not* work (where
"work" means "use CP437 recardless of the computers settings).
Digital Man
Re: Extended ASCII for users
> I've noticed that for some users on my BBS, Synchronet doesn't display
> extended ASCII characters. I'm not sure if this is due to user preference
> or Synchronet's terminal detection. Today I noticed a user create a new
> account on my BBS, and extended ASCII was disabled for him. I saw him
> enable extended ASCII in his preferences, but then turned it off. I think
> some of the things on my BBS look a little ugly when converted to regular
> ASCII characters.. I thought all BBS telnet software would support
> extended ASCII characters - so I'd guess that some users aren't using
> BBS-specific telnet clients. I'd like my BBS to look good for all users -
> but is this something I should really be concerned about?
New users are asked when creating their account if they support extended-ASCII
or not. Not all telnet clients (or terminals/consoles) support IBM CP437
("extended ASCII") characters correclty.
digital man
Synchronet "Real Fact" #56:
Synchronet introduced Telnet, FTP, SMTP and POP3 support w/v3.00a-Win32 in 2000.
Deuce
Re: Extended ASCII for users
> New users are asked when creating their account if they support
> extended-ASCII or not. Not all telnet clients (or terminals/consoles)
> support IBM CP437 ("extended ASCII") characters correclty.
Yeah, that should prolly be changed... "Extended ASCII" and "CP437" don't
actually mean the same thing... CP850 is just as much "Extended ASCII" as CP437
is.
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mro
.,: This is something about Extended ASCII for users,
--ДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДД-ДДДД---ДДДДДДДДДДДДДДД---ДДДДДДДДД--ДДДДДДДД
> To: mro
> Re: Extended ASCII for users
> By: mro to Nightfox on Sun May 15 2011 03:12 pm
> > just tell the guy to use a decent client.
> It's not the clients fault. SyncTERM is the only one I'm aware of which
> completely ignore the OSs country settings and blindly forces CP437 by defau
> (and then only in *some* output modes). SyncTERM doing this is actually
> *incorrect* behaviour, so any decent client will actually *not* work (where
> "work" means "use CP437 recardless of the computers settings).
well this is the first time i've heard of it. i get people from germany all
the time. i know they're not all using syncterm as well.
i'll have to ask them what clients they are using.
Deuce
Re: Extended ASCII for users
> well this is the first time i've heard of it. i get people from germany all
> the time. i know they're not all using syncterm as well.
>
> i'll have to ask them what clients they are using.
A lot of people using CP850 just put up with the display glitches and most
others know how to set up a program to run in the secondary codepage. The
display glitches aren't *that* pronounced with CP850 (just the intersections of
single and double lines) and are easily ignored. The biggest problem is when
people are using Windows-1252 or ISO-8859-1 - neither of which have *any*
graphical characters but both of which are becoming a more common default for
8-bit charsets.
Digital Man
Re: Extended ASCII for users
> Re: Extended ASCII for users
> By: Digital Man to Nightfox on Mon May 16 2011 06:20 pm
>
> > New users are asked when creating their account if they support
> > extended-ASCII or not. Not all telnet clients (or terminals/consoles)
> > support IBM CP437 ("extended ASCII") characters correclty.
>
> Yeah, that should prolly be changed... "Extended ASCII" and "CP437" don't
> actually mean the same thing... CP850 is just as much "Extended ASCII" as
> CP437 is.
Sure, but "IBM Extended ASCII" is the accepted pseudonym for CP437.
digital man
Synchronet "Real Fact" #80:
Vertrauen has had the FidoNet node number 1:103/705 since 1992.
Nightfox
Re: Extended ASCII for users
> > Yeah, that should prolly be changed... "Extended ASCII" and "CP437" don't
> > actually mean the same thing... CP850 is just as much "Extended ASCII" as
> > CP437 is.
> Sure, but "IBM Extended ASCII" is the accepted pseudonym for CP437.
I'd have to agree - Especially in the context of BBSing, I've always understood
"IBM Extended ASCII" to mean the high-ASCII characters commonly used to draw
graphics on BBSs (block & line drawing characters, etc.).
Nightfox
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Corey
Re: Extended ASCII for users
> Re: Extended ASCII for users
> By: Digital Man to Deuce on Tue May 17 2011 16:09:21
>
> > > Yeah, that should prolly be changed... "Extended ASCII" and "CP437" do
> > > actually mean the same thing... CP850 is just as much "Extended ASCII"
> > > CP437 is.
>
> > Sure, but "IBM Extended ASCII" is the accepted pseudonym for CP437.
>
> I'd have to agree - Especially in the context of BBSing, I've always underst
> "IBM Extended ASCII" to mean the high-ASCII characters commonly used to draw
> graphics on BBSs (block & line drawing characters, etc.).
>
> Nightfox
>
don't ascii me and I won't ascii you.
"Practise safe Lunch, Use a Condiment"
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Nightfox
Re: Extended ASCII for users
> don't ascii me and I won't ascii you.
ASCII stupid question, and you'll get a stupid ANSI.
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Deuce
Re: Extended ASCII for users
> Sure, but "IBM Extended ASCII" is the accepted pseudonym for CP437.
I realize it's *a* pseudonum used in english countries... but it's surely not
*the* accepted pseudonym... to be pedantic, *the* name is "IBM437" and "cp437",
"437", and "csPC8CodePage437" are the accepted aliases. IBM850 is aliased to
"cp850", "850", and "csPC850Multilingual". (Source:
http://www.iana.org/assignments/character-sets).
Both are extended ASCII sets defined by IBM, and I would suspect the odds are
good that someone from a cp850 native country should he hear "IBM Extended
ASCII" in their native tounge would assume cp850.
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Deuce
Re: Extended ASCII for users
> > Sure, but "IBM Extended ASCII" is the accepted pseudonym for CP437.
>
> I'd have to agree - Especially in the context of BBSing, I've always
> understood "IBM Extended ASCII" to mean the high-ASCII characters commonly
> used to draw graphics on BBSs (block & line drawing characters, etc.).
Ah, but for you, the extended IBM ASCII set has always been CP437 no?
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Deuce
Re: Extended ASCII for users
> Both are extended ASCII sets defined by IBM, and I would suspect the odds
> are good that someone from a cp850 native country should he hear "IBM
> Extended ASCII" in their native tounge would assume cp850.
Here's an interesting reference from an old european ascii/ansi artist:
"ASCII as in Text art and Code Page 437 or me in Europe Code Page 850 and NOT
ASCII as in American Standard Code for Information Interchange, specifically
US-ASCII or ISO 646"
http://www.roysac.com/ascii_art_primer.asp
This guy grew up in Germany so... I'll ask him. :-)
Joe Delahaye
Re: Extended ASCII for users
> > don't ascii me and I won't ascii you.
>
> ASCII stupid question, and you'll get a stupid ANSI.
>
You Beta not say that again.
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Mickel
Re: Extended ASCII for users
> Re: Extended ASCII for users
> By: Nightfox to Corey on Tue May 17 2011 20:26:01
>
> > > don't ascii me and I won't ascii you.
> >
> > ASCII stupid question, and you'll get a stupid ANSI.
> >
>
> You Beta not say that again.
ASCII! I think i'm getting a code...
(Say it out loud with your nose pinched as if your sick).
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Jon Justvig
-=> Mickel scribbled to Joe Delahaye <=-
> Re: Extended ASCII for users
> By: Nightfox to Corey on Tue May 17 2011 20:26:01
>
> > > don't ascii me and I won't ascii you.
> >
> > ASCII stupid question, and you'll get a stupid ANSI.
> >
>
> You Beta not say that again.
Mi> ASCII! I think i'm getting a code...
Mi> (Say it out loud with your nose pinched as if your sick).
ASCII before you speak and don't be ANSI about it.
Sincerely,
Jon Justvig
... Gone crazy, be back later, please leave message.
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