ISO-8859-1 (WAS cacha?a and OFF TOPIC)

[Mike Salovesh]

"James E. Clapp" wrote:
>
> Mike Salovesh wrote:
> >
> > To produce these characters, I press and hold <ALT> while entering a
> > 3-digit code.
>
> I thought this didn't work for me until I quit using the numbers on the
> regular keyboard and started using those on the number pad (where this
> works regardless of whether Num Lock is on or off).

Thanks for pointing that out.  I wouldn't have noticed, because I always
use the number pad for numbers . . .  which comes from having run 10-key
adding machines and calculators in one of my past lives.

> Who'd have thought
> of such a thing?  Where did you learn about this esoteric feature?

Back several operating systems and word processing programs ago, I found
it awkward and time-consuming to set accents, etc., for text I was
trying to write or copy in Spanish.  I forget which combination of OS
and processor I was using. (Most likely it was DOS 3.12 and either Word
Perfect 5.1 or the final edition of WordStar.)  My computer guru son was
home on a visit, heard me cursing in the back room, and came back to see
what was wrong.  He said something in guruspeak that means "Have you
tried doing this?"  Wow!  It worked!  I've been doing it ever since; I
even have a printout of the table of equivalences taped to the bottom of
my monitor.

> > I use an updated Netscape 4.5 and Compaq's version of WIN 95...
> > I set the combination to run ISO-8859-1...
>
> How?

"Sunny side up" -- no, that's the wrong punch line.

For the moment, I forget; I did it to return to everyday use after I
checked out additional flavors of ISO and some oddball character sets.
I'll try to reconstruct whatever I did when I get some time over the
weekend.  Unless somebody who really knows what to do tells the list
before then.

I can list the steps you have to go through to accomplish a task, but
that's a far cry from an explanation: it's a cookbook recipe.  What
Andrea said about ISO-8859 as related to, or implemented by, Windows was
a real explanation. Andrea is a chef; I only write down recipes as I
find them. Thanks, Andrea!

My solutions to computer problems fall halfway between total computer
ignorance and high computer sophistication. They are neither the height
of sophisticated efficiency nor the ultimate state of the art, but they
usually get the job done. Given time, I can somehow find a brute force
solution to making the computer do whatever I want it to. The effort,
however, takes so much out of me that I stick with the solution I found
long after real geniuses have implemented much better and much more
elegant solutions and everybody else has adopted them.

That's why I kept on using WordStar long after its death in the real
world.

-- mike salovesh                    <salovesh at niu.edu>
PEACE !!!