Date: Tue, 18 Jan 2000 10:16:26 +0200 (IST)
From: Eli Zaretskii <eliz AT is DOT elta DOT co DOT il>
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To: Shawn Hargreaves <SHargreaves AT acclaimstudios DOT co DOT uk>
cc: djgpp AT delorie DOT com
Subject: Re: Allegro, Ansi, TTF2PCX and Umlauts
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On Mon, 17 Jan 2000, Shawn Hargreaves wrote:

> The problem comes when you want to talk to the outside world, such
> as using strings that you typed into your text editor. Here, it really
> all depends on what text format your editor is using. At least for
> most European countries, Windows and Unix systems will tend to be
> using the Latin-1 codepage, which is the same thing as the first 256
> characters of Unicode. You could use this text directly with Allegro
> in U_ASCII mode, or run it through the textconv program if you want
> to convert it into U_UTF8 format. If you are using a DOS editor, 
> though, you are in trouble: DOS can use many different character
> layouts depending what country you are in, and Allegro doesn't know
> anything about these.

Yes, editing non-ASCII text is currently a mess, particularly when you 
need to pass the text file between different programs.  There are no good 
solutions, at least AFAIK.  Emacs 20 comes pretty close (it knows about 
DOS/Windows codepages, all Latin-N encodings, and many other popular 
encodings like KOI8-R, but doesn't support Unicode yet).