Hello Henri,

On Wednesday May 29 2019 22:55, you wrote to me:

 HD>>> At this moment I donot like the UTF 8 circus.

"Onbekend maakt onbemind".

 HD> The complex use of apostrophes etc is only a way to distinguish from
 HD> other languages, and nothing more.

While in some languagas the use of accents, umlauts, tremas and other
diacritics may be purely cosmetic in some cases, in others they are essential
to properly convey the meaning or indicate the pronunciation.

In Dutch the accents and tremas are essential. "Een" and "‚‚n" mean different
things. "Roel" and "Ro‰l" are not the same person.

And than of course there are languages with a completely different alfabet,
Greek and Russian come to mind.

Bj”rn is right. The 26 letters of the ASCII character set are not enough to
properly express oneself in writing. Even for the Brittish it is not enough .
No pound sign 'œ' in ASCII...

 Mvdv>> So what we have in common is that we have something we do not
 Mvdv>> like.

 HD> Yes because not al my systems can display all kinds of code pages.

The early computers were a step back. My first typewriter had no problems with
accents and tremas. It even had a key for the Dutch concatenatd 'ij'. My first
computer was Upper case ASCII only. But computers have evolved. Now my computer
can do much more than that typewriter.

 HD> I have at least 3 different ones.

 HD> First I have the UniCorn BBS system at Dos 5 with CP437

My memory may fail me, but IIRC even DOS 5 had the CHCP command to switch code
pages. It came with at least a dozen. CP850 and CP866 included. For DOS there
was also CYRILLIC.COM.

 HD> Second I have all the RISC OS machines (RiscPC's, Pi's) using Latin 1.

An exotic OS that may or may not support UTF-8 and/or IPv6 in future ...

 HD> And third the Raspbian Stretch Linux at several other Raspberry Pi's.
 HD> The last one can both Latin 1 and UTF8 If I am right.

So it does UTF-8...

 HD> When I collect some text from a website, I can only save that textfile
 HD> If I choose UTF8. Whith the Default Latin 1 the saving gives an error,
 HD> and won't save the textfile at all ;-(.

Almost all websites are UTF-8 these days. So of course you will hve problems
with saving it in Latin-1. Adapt or be left behind...

 HD>>> So if contributing FidoNews is restricted to UTF8 only, it will
 HD>>> sure decrease your input.

 MvdV>> So simple submit your contribution in ASCII only. ASCII is a
 MvdV>> subset of UTF-8, so it will be accepted.

 HD> Ok, thanks for the explanation.

Always glad to be of help.

 MvdV>> Just help me refresh my memory: how many article did you submit
 MvdV>> so far?

 HD> Sorry, but that is zero.

In that case I think you should display a bit of modesty when venting opinions
about what may or may not hold people back from submitting articles.

Cheers, Michiel

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