Re: arsclist Raw Marc Record, Orecords.mrc

[<stevenc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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----- Original Message -----
From: "Premise Checker" <checker@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <ARSCLIST@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Tuesday, December 17, 2002 9:43 PM
Subject: Re: arsclist Raw Marc Record, Orecords.mrc


> There are lots of 256 (8 bit) character sets out there. The first 128 are
> ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange), the old  7-bit
> code (2^7 = 128), but the second 128 characters can vary. I use ISO-8859-1
> (Latin 1 = West European). ISO = International Standards
> Organization. These sets range from 0 to 255. 127 is the last of ASCII and
> is DEL (delete). 128 is the first of the upper half and is C cedila. If
> you are seeing that character now, Ç, you are using 8859-1, or perhaps
> 8859-2 (Latin 2 = East European). I got it by holding down the alt key and
> typing 128 from the keypad, NOT from the top row. (You can't do this on a
> laptop, which has no keypad.) Google 8859-1 and you can get the whole 256
> character set. (8859-8 is Arabic, by the way, in its upper half.) For some
> reason, I often don't see on my screen what I should be getting, according
> to the table and instead just get ¦ (broken vertical bar, when I typed
> alt-176. Alt-200, +, gives the plus sign, alt-202, -, the minus sign. I
> can get alt-145, æ, the lower case ae, and alt-146, Æ, the upper case AE,
> but none of the other four Icelandic characters.
>
> What's really funny is alt-152,  , which is a space but takes two manual
> insertions of the space bar to get moving again!
>
> In a moment, I'll send the whole list of what happens at my keyboard,
> again which is not according to the table you can google to get. I came
> along too late to have learned what a lot of the commands mean.
> Frank
Note that the disply of the high-order characters will be totally
different in DOS-based programs (running under DOS, even in
Windows) and in Windows-based programs...at least for those
above about 180 or so. DOS displays box-drawing characters,
for which Windows seems to substitute -, -, +, etc.
The first 32 bytes, AKA "control characters," usually don't
display anything...however, some will generate the appropriate
response (tab, line feed, backspace, usw.) when you enter
them. Also, entering Alt+### and Alt+0### will result in two
different characters. (Oddly enough, Alt+###, if ### > 256,
will produce the ### mod 256 character!).
Further, there are display equivalents (seldom seen in this new
digital world) for the control characters, used in the ur-days of
computing, which result in happy faces, card suits, and the like.
These sometimes show up when you issue the DOS command
of TYPE <filename> and filename is a binary file...except that
null (value of zero) bytes stop the typing, as does (I think)
h21, which is the DOS EOF indicator.
This would seem to make it difficult to create MARC files
on a Windows-based (or any?) PC...
...stevenc

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