Re: Lynx & special characters

[connolly@cc.memphis.edu]

In article <3qqnt4$r7d@cello.gina.calstate.edu>, lcornel@cello.gina.calstate.edu (Louis C Cornelio) writes:
> hello all! Did everyone miss this inquiry; odd that _nobody_ would take a 
> stab at it, given the high level of expertise out there!
> 
> perhap a related question, if the problem has to do with the video display.
> What does anyone know about the Spanish language capable IIc that was 
> marketed south of the border & how did it differ from our IIc here? There 
> was even a Spanish Language version of Appleworks!
> 
> - Louis
> 
> 
> background detail & questions below:
>> 
>> Anyone have any experience getting Spanish characters on the www using 
>> Lynx & ProTerm 3.1 w/an Apple II? A bit of background:
>> 
>> Louis C Cornelio (lcornel@cello.gina.calstate.edu) wrote:
>> : I visit several www sites in Spanish, but doen't get the correct
>> : characters displayed. Any idea why or how to remedy? One hint from a
>> : person who runs such a page:
>>  
>> : :        if characters with a binary equivalent value of greater than
>> : :        128 get stripped out, then you won't get the correct display.
>> --
>> Lynx should do all that for you.  The Apple 2's were the only popular
>> PC's (I know of) that set the 8th bit for text sent to the display...but
>> that's kid's stuff compared to the bizarre array of "soft swithches"
>> used to access special video features and memory above 48K. As far as I
>> know, all the Apple 2 implementations of the vt100 terminal emmulation
>> standard involved some fudging that left the platform less than rock
>> solid in www's hypertext environment.  I'd suggest changing terminal
>> programs or trying your program from a different A2.  A different video
>> driver could solve the problem.....

I run ProTerm 3.0 and know 3.1 only from a demo.  But: the problem is the video
display.  ProTerm uses text mode, so that it displays only the characters in a
ROM chip.  On a IIe or IIc (or IIc+), that means only ASCII codes $20 to $7F. 
(yes, the high bit is set before the character is displayed, but that's
irrelevant.)  A foreign machine might have the characters you want in ROM, and
a IIGS has them all -- as particular character sets for different languages
that can be selected from the control panel (or, for all I know, with soft
switches).  The problem is, though, that in the ISO character set generally used
for WWW, the foreign characters are in high ASCII ($80 to $FF) -- all the ones
for each commonly used European language.  Even with a foreign machine, your
terminal program would have to convert these to some low-ASCII code used in
that machine's character set.  Not surprisingly, ProTerm doesn't do this, since
it assumes a machine lacking such characters in ROM.  If the character sets on
the IIGS are selectable by soft switches, the software would have to know what
set contains the character in question, throw the soft switch, convert to the
appropriate 7-bit code, and then display the character.  Quite a pain, even if
it's possible.

The solution on any Apple is graphics mode display, with an ISO font.  This
would be quite easy to do; my IIe word processor (Gutenberg, defunct since
1987) can, and does, display ASCII codes $01 to $FF, though any resemblance
between Gutenberg code assignments and ISO is purely coincidental.  But I don't
know any terminal program that does this.

(BTW, Lynx on our Vax does pass 8-bit codes to the Apple; it's just that the
Apple software ignores the high bit because of the hardware constraints.)

E-mail me if you care to argue; I don't get here often.

Leo

Leo A. Connolly                         Foreign Languages & Literatures
connolly@msuvx1.memphis.edu             University of Memphis