by azeemba on 6/28/24, 12:46 PM with 75 comments
by swatcoder on 6/28/24, 7:03 PM
Ultimately, many "character sets" combined printable characters, cursor/head control, and record boundaries into one serialized byte stream that could be used by terminals, printers, programs for all sorts of purposes.
by PaulHoule on 6/28/24, 6:53 PM
by bhaak on 6/29/24, 8:40 AM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_key
I can't claim I know how they relate exactly to the accented characters being encoded in character sets but they seem to be at least historically an influence. Pressing a dead key which doesn't advance the cursor and then overwrite the basic character over it is certainly faster than using backspace (also cheaper if you think about character pricing).
That the ECMA specs only talk about using BACKSPACE is surprising. At least those OS I used only supported the dead key approach but of course that was decades after the specs were written.
by hsdropout on 6/28/24, 7:16 PM
If the expanded count doesn't match, a diacritic might be present.
[0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.text.nor...
by surfingdino on 6/28/24, 8:38 PM
by Theodores on 6/28/24, 7:40 PM
To some extent the character set was still evolving, for example the Euro sign was not around until decades later and that would need to be bolted together with backspace characters or escape codes, maybe even downloaded characters, with the printer specific manual (Epson) studied at great length.
In the DOS era (and before with home micros that were programmed in BASIC) it was quite normal to compose things for the printer that you had no expectation of seeing on screen, not that anyone read much on screen (as everyone had vast piles of paper on their desk).
Until quite recently some POS systems were very much tied in to a very specific printer, at least these character sets were a step forward from hard coding a BASIC program to an exact make and model of printer.
by BugsJustFindMe on 6/28/24, 7:20 PM
The asker completely ignores that asking questions about accent marks, like they themselves are doing in that very post, would be a lot more annoying without being able to write said accent marks.
by jfim on 6/29/24, 12:20 AM
For example, one could type ë by entering ¨ then following with e. The ¨ would be displayed at the position where the combined character would be, while waiting for the second character to be entered. Once the second character is entered, the display would be updated with the correct combined character.
by bhaak on 6/28/24, 8:17 PM
New? Some computers of the 1980s could already do this. At least the 16 bit home computers had bitmap drawn characters on the screen.
Edit: Looks like somebody doesn't believe that computers in the 80s had such a thing.
> On the Amiga, rendering text is similar to rendering lines and shapes. The Amiga graphics library provides text functions based around the RastPort structure, which makes it easy to intermix graphics and text.
> In order to render text, the Amiga needs to have a graphical representation for each symbol or text character. These individual images are known as glyphs. The Amiga gets each glyph from a font in the system font list. At present, the fonts in the system list contain a bitmap of a specific point size for all the characters and symbols of the font.
by timonoko on 6/29/24, 7:34 AM
Otherwise HYVÄÄ YÖTÄ was HYV{{ Y|T{, which was only little miserable.
But if you changed the ROM into Swedish ROM, {a|b} become äaöbå, which was basically unreadable.
by cryptonector on 6/28/24, 11:59 PM
by scelerat on 6/28/24, 7:08 PM