Date:	Sat, 6 May 2000 17:27:10 -0400 (EDT)
Message-Id:	<200005062127.RAA07140@indy.delorie.com>
From:	Eli Zaretskii <eliz AT delorie DOT com>
To:	djgpp AT delorie DOT com
In-reply-to:	<qs76hscchr2ni7eniju6e1kle25njc6f84@4ax.com> (message from Damian
	Yerrick on Fri, 05 May 2000 19:29:41 GMT)
Subject:	Re: IBM Extended Character Set...
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> From: Damian Yerrick <Bullcr_pd_yerrick AT hotmail DOT comRemoveBullcr_p>
> Newsgroups: comp.os.msdos.djgpp
> Date: Fri, 05 May 2000 19:29:41 GMT
>
> But you really should be designing your own fonts:
>  1. The BIOS fonttables are in Codepage 437 or the similar CP 850,
>     but text files (especially from Windows) tend to use Latin 1.

This is inaccurate to the degree that it might be misleading.

DOS and DOS boxes on Windows use DOS codepages for non-ASCII
characters.  The exact codepage that is installed by default on each
machine depends on the locale.  In the US and in many Western-European
countries you will typically see codepage 437 or 850, but other
locales will have other codepages.  (My machine has codepage 862, for
example.)

Latin-1 (a.k.a. ISO-8859-1) character set is not a Windows character
set, its origins are on Unix systems.  The according Windows codepage
is 1252, and it just happens to be identical to Latin-1.  Again,
non-US, non-European locales will normally have some Windows codepage
other than 1252 installed; most of those codepages are (surprise!)
not identical to the equivalent ISO-8859-n character sets.

Thus, text files that come from Windows programs are generally *not*
in Latin-1 encoding.

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