America and Americans / Europeans

[Mark A Mandel]

On Fri, 22 Feb 2002, sagehen wrote:

#Mark Mandel writes:
#
#>Time for the ASCII rant. Not ranting at you, mind you; just as a general
#>reminder:
#>        =============
# >No underlines, no italics, no boldface, no color, no size specification,
#>no font specification, no justified lines, no settable margins, no
#>accented characters, no curly quotes, no en or em dashes, no ellipses...
#
#~~~~~~~~
#  Gotcha.  Actually, I knew about the limitations of ASCII & have a table
#somewhere that I've even been known to consult for that first group of 170
#or so characters that travel successfully through cyberspace.  I usually
#use the conventions /..../, *....* and _......_ for italics, bold &
#underline respectively.  But I'm  a computer simpleton running an elderly
#Mac with an early Eudora mail program & am often puzzled by what goes on
#after I push "send." One of my correspondents, who has very similar
#equipment, also told me that when I use the degree sign it arrives on her
#screen bollixed up.  On the other hand my recent post, after passing
#through whatever it is that happens out there, returned to me via the List
#with the sign intact.

On YOUR screen, not necessarily everyone else's. You're reading it with
the system that wrote it, which is like running a test on the same data
you used to build the program with: it has its place, but we call it
cheating; not pejoratively so, when it's done for the proper purpose,
but to keep us reminded of just how meaningful it is(n't).

In fact, I can guarantee it won't work on *everyone* else's screen,
because the degree sign isn't ASCII. You can print out that ASCII rant
as a handy cheat sheet (kept below).

Or you can just look at your keyboard, if it's a standard US keyboard.
If the character doesn't appear on a key-cap (allowing upper and lower
case for the 26 letters of the American Roman alphabet), it ain't ASCII.
Do you have the degree sign on a key-cap?

#         I see lots of posts from other lists replete with
#strange substitutions for basic punctuation marks.  I also get posts that
#seem to evade the limitations of ASCII by being able to impose on my screen
#their bold & italics & even color.

Your screen, your mailreader, your system. Not (usually) mine.

#>Letters: a-z, A-Z
#>Digits: 0-9
#>Punctuation and special characters:
#>        !@#$%^&*()
#>        _-+=/
#>        ,.:;"'?
#>        <>`~
#>        {}[]|\  (these last 6 may look different in Scandinavia)
#>Whitespace:
#>        SPACE
#>        TAB (which will come out differently on different machines,
#>         programs, and so on. As I type this the T of "TAB" lines up
#>         under the "c" of "Whitespace"; your mileage may vary.)
#>        RETURN or ENTER (which produces different code on different
#>         platforms. The Internet can translate that much in the text
#>         of a message, but not in an attachment.)

-- Mark M.