Re: Character Code Limited Music Symbols

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From: Gary Smith (bitbucket_at_example.com)
Date: 07/21/04 

Date: Tue, 20 Jul 2004 22:55:00 -0700

"Don MI <>" <d7macm8@hotmail.com> wrote:
> ASCII is an acronym referring to a standard established by a technical group
> recognized by the National Bureau of Standards as authorized to produce
> standards. A number of such engineering groups are so recognized. I think,
> but at this time are not sure, that ASC refers to the American Society of
> Computer Engineers. ASCII is a standard that relates numbers, characters
> and symbols to specific code. For example the number 155 relates to the
> cents symbol and the number 0155 relates to the > symbol.

The ASCII standard defines characters only for values 0 through 127.
Anything above 127 is the province of some extended character set
definition, of which there are thousands. Microsoft refers to these
various character sets as code pages. The default code page used by
Windows is CP1252, commonly but erroneously known as "ANSI". It's
standard only within Windows.

> As a standards, the code ALT-155 should always correspond to the cents
> symbol. As far as I know all fonts that have ASCII code assigned to
> numbers, characters and symbols follow the ASCII standard. While all
> numbers, characters have assigned ASCII code numbers not all symbols have
> ASCII code numbers. If you look at various symbols in Character Map some
> will have only unicode assigned.

This is true only of Microsoft code pages, and is dependent on the font as
well. Character sets which conform to the ISO character set standards
reserve the values 128-159 for control characters and never assign graphic
symbols to those values. Macs and other non-Microsoft will have no
characters, or completely different characters, in that range. How
Alt-155 appears is entirely dependent on the receiver's system and doesn't
necessarily have anything to do with what the sender intended. That's one
reason why basic internet functions such as email and especially
newsgroups are expected to be ASCII-only plain text. 

-- 
Gary L. Smith                gls432@yahoo.com
Columbus, Ohio

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