Trouble with extended ASCII

[AlanMiller]

I tried correcting an old post by inserting an "e" with acute accent. This used to work using Alt+0233. Now it comes up as é. Is there an alternative (hopefully simple) way to insert from an extended character set?

Alan

[John Gray]

I just got é with Alt+130 ...
And é is what I just got by editing this post and trying Alt+0233

Keyboard Character Mapping.txt

[HansV]

The source code of all Lounge pages specifies UTF-8:

<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />

It looks like your browser ignores that and uses a non-Unicode code page. No idea why.

An alternative for é is Alt+130. And you can use the Character Map accessory in Windows.

[AlanMiller]

Interesting. I used Charmap to identify the character and it gives me Alt+0233 for every character set and font table. Your file, John, lists both 130 and 0233. Where do I find the 3-digit (old) codes in Windows 7 Charmap? Here are the two: é é. Both appear correct while typing and in Preview. Let's see what happens when I Submit.

Alan

Edit: Now both look OK here in my browser!

[HansV]

Character Map nowadays shows only the Unicode number...

[AlanMiller]

Character Map nowadays shows only the Unicode number...

Yet another sad oversight as MS "improves" its software.

Alan

[AlanMiller]

Just out of interest, here is the old "offending" post. I tried to edit (correct) it as above, but kept getting the "rogue" symbols instead of the é.

Alan

[John Gray]

At the top of my file you will see that the three-character Alt codes use the old DOS code page 850, and the four-character Unicode version uses Windows Code Page 1252.

Thank heaven we don't have to mess about with this arcane knowledge much nowadays...

[John Gray]

Just out of interest, here is the old "offending" post. I tried to edit (correct) it as above, but kept getting the "rogue" symbols instead of the é.

I've just done the same, and the é appears correctly (in Preview, latest version of Firefox), both when added and when removing the incorrect characters and replacing.

This appears anomalous!

[AlanMiller]

Yes ... all seems a bit odd. But code pages! Thanks for that nostalgic trip back into a former life.

Alan

[Argus]

[...] Thank heaven we don't have to mess about with this arcane knowledge much nowadays...

Agree! (And most of you can be happy that your name or address doesn't include any of those diacritics. Early days of email were no fun. ) That said, in this case, acute and grave accent are on the key next to backspace on my Swe/Fin keyboard (similar to the Dutch layout next to the Enter key).

An old tutorial (on character code issues) and Characters and encodings.

Maybe we have mentioned it, but why is there a problem with some characters in some of the older posts (I noticed this a couple of years ago)?

(I noticed that the Dutch keyboard has a key for the degree symbol ° on the key next to backspace, nifty; though I think many have some kind of US keyboard layout. I assume it is not an ordinal indicator, º as in Italian, Spanish etc. 1º, 2º.) (Another problem in this world of characters, encodings and fonts; characters that look almost identical in many fonts.)

[HansV]

Maybe we have mentioned it, but why is there a problem with some characters in some of the older posts (I noticed this a couple of years ago)?

We moved to a different server/host in December of 2012. Something went wrong during the transfer from the old server to the new one. Fortunately, the damage is limited.

[Argus]

Thank you, Hans. Thought it was something like that. Indeed, it's very limited. You all are doing a great job.