Re: problems with german umlauts

[Anthony W. Youngman]

In message <address@hidden>, Bertalan Fodor 
<address@hidden> writes
> > > Because most accented European characters can not be accessed within
> > ascii
> > My ascii table shows all French, Norwegian, Danish characters as well 
> > as most  spanish, and german (can't profess to be an expert there) see 
> > characters 191-
> > 255 (xBF - xff).  Are these accessable in a non-unicode document?
> AFAIK you must use UTF-8. (It is not the same as 'unicode' in general.) 
> The documentation should be clearer.
>
> Bert
>
> ps: Anyway, my note was because of Central and Eastern European 
> Languages - Polish, Slovakian, Czech, Slovenian, Croatian, Romanian 
> etc, even users of cyrillic alphabets: Serbian, Russian, Bulgarian, and 
> more. I must also mention Greece. There are even 27 countries in the EU 
> now, and only 10 or such of them are handled fully by ASCII. Now it's 
> time for editor softwares to handle this "new" situation ;-)
Even English isn't handled properly by ASCII - after all, the A stands 
for "American", don'cher'no :-)

Although rarely used (and invariably got wrong), English has a 27th 
letter that is often seen, namely the (I think) thorn. Pronounced "th", 
it's a Y with a bar through it (think Japanese Yen symbol here), and is 
usually seen in signs saying things like "Ye olde coffee shoppe".

(Which is why "ye" is NOT an archaic *pronounciation* of "the", it's a 
corruption of an old *spelling* of "the".)

Cheers,
Wol
--
Anthony W. Youngman - address@hidden