Re: problems with german umlauts

[Jonathan Henkelman]

Mats Bengtsson <mats.bengtsson <at> ee.kth.se> writes:

> 
> You are mistaken. ASCII only defines character codes up to 127, see for 
> example http://www.asciitable.com/.
> What your table shows is probably Latin1 (ISO 8859-1).
> 
>    /Mats

Mats: FYI I am using an ascii table in my "little black pocket ref." which 
does not differentiate between standard and extended table.  Also I use the 
one provided in MS Word.  It allows you to pick between Unicode (various 
subsets) ASCII hex and decimal, but it also does not differentiate between 
extended and basic.

What I am hearing hear in the larger context is that the "basic" ASCII set is 
only 127 characters while what I am used to using is actually one of a number 
of extended character sets...

The manual is plenty clear about using utf-8 for non-latin alphabets. Where I 
get confused in the manual is this:

PDF version 2.10.0 pg. 112 paragraph 4: "To enter lyrics with characters from 
non-English languages, or with non-ASCII characters (such as the heart symbol 
or slanted quotes), ...".  This could be changed to "... non-English 
languages, or with extended ASCII characters (accented or special characters 
such as the heart symbol or slanted quotes), ..." 

However on the same page paragraph 7: "A word in Lyrics mode begins 
with: ... , any 8-bit character with ASCII code over 127, ..."  This is simply 
not true (I just tried it and upper ascii codes do not work in lyric mode 
(10.2.0) even when starting a word.  This reference should be deleted if LP is 
not going to support it. If the docment is UTF-8 encoded then it really isn't 
an ASCII code over 127 anyway. :)

For the sake of completeness other manual references which will need to be 
updated:

pg 158, para. 2: delete "... non-ascii text (such as characters from other 
languages), ..." and insert "... extended ASCII text (such as accented and 
special characters or characters from other languages), ...

pg 227, sec 10.1.7, para 1: delete "... non-ASCII ...", and insert " ... 
extended ascii characters (such as accented and special characters or 
characters from other languages) ..."

Do not change the reference on pg 288! as it refers to ABC not LP.
The reference on pg 332 seems fine and is part of GNU license.

That being said, can anyone answer what happens in LP when upper ascii 
characters are encountered.  Is there any reason they can't just be mapped to 
whatever the upper ascii table is on that machine (or some standard within the 
LP community)?  It would make it much easier for english speakers who only 
occasionally use accented characters.  I edit using xemacs and am not looking 
forward to trying to get it save in UTF-8.

> UTF-8 is the only way to write both in danish AND french on the same text... 

On my machine I can write a single ascii text document (using the full table) 
that is in german, spanish, danish, norwegian, french, english.

Thanks
J