character map

[Mark A. Mandel]

sagehen <sagehen at WESTELCOM.COM> writes:

        >>>
Dave Wilton writes:

Windows has a useful function called "Character Map."
        [...]

 You can find it under Start/Programs/Accessories/System Tools. It lists
all the characters for all the fonts installed on your machine. It gives
you ready access to any number of useful symbols, like ¢ © ë ð. It's not
as handy as having them on the keyboard itself, but for infrequently
used symbols it's a good tool.

~~~~~~~~~~

        [sagehen]
Macs have this function, also, accessed by Command-Option-Q, for
whatever font happens to be being used.  The existence of the character
set doesn't necessarily mean that email will carry them unchanged.
        <<<

        [Mark M]
Right. You (for all values of "you") may be able to *type* it, but that
doesn't mean that I (likewise) will see it correctly in my email. I see
Dave's four examples of "useful symbols" as
        cent sign
        copyright symbol
        lowercase e with dieresis (aka umlaut)
        edh (Old English and Icelandic letter that looks like a
          mirror-image '6' with a bar through the top part)
 and that's probably what he meant them to be, but some of you probably
see them differently.


        >>>
        [sagehen resumes]
I think only those with ASCII codes under 170-something can be counted
on to remain consistent. Mark Mandel once described them on this list as
being limited to those that appeared on the standard typewriter
keyboard.

A. Murie
        <<<

        [Mark M resumes]
The limit is 126 (decimal); actually, 126, since 127 is the DEL code.
And the ASCII keys are the ones on a standard US *computer* keyboard.
Here's the list, extracted from my "ASCII rant"
(http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~mamandel/ascii-rant.txt):

Letters: a-z, A-Z
Digits: 0-9
Punctuation and special characters:
        !@#$%^&*()
        _-+=/
        ,.:;"'?
        <>`~
        {}[]|\  (these last 6 may look different in some regions of
                 the world)
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 A. Mandel