dear Martin,
what you describe is something I devised myself in the
early 80-ies, when the hospital I worked for had PDP 11/34
mini's, and I was trying to get some Polish written and printed.
I did use 'ax' for 'aacute', 'zx' for 'zdot' etc, I didn't use the 'q', and
I don't think I bothered for the rare 'zacute' [who would need
'pa¼dziernik' when you could write 'pa¿dziernik' ;)]. Of course this was
only for writing comfort, since I afterwards used some 'macros' to get rid
of the 'x' by replacing 'ax' by 'a backspace , ' and 'lx' by 'l backspace / '.
This worked perfectly for some printers, but I vaguely [ ;) ] remember my boss
getting very annoyed when another 'daisy wheel' had got corrupted.
As I said, this was all my private game, since nobody in the Netherlands
was then ever trying to bother to get 'proper' Polish in print. And in
some respect hardly anybody is doing that now.... Nothing changed much...
Despite of the great efforts the ISO/Unicode community has been making
in the past 20 years...
gtx, Rein
On Sun, 03 Mar 2002, Martin Kochanski wrote:
>At 16:12 03/03/02 +0100, R.C. Bakhuizen van den Brink [Rein] wrote:
>>I'm not so sure whether I know what you mean...
>>
>>I do remember that in order to have both the zacute
>>and zdot using the Alt+a =ñ, Alt+c= ‘ etc. Alt+z = zdot
>>and Alt+x = zacute, since the zdot is most often used and
>>the zacute rather scarcely...
>
>No, I was talking about representing Polish **in ASCII**, which means the letters
a to z and A to Z *only* (plus various symbols). I think you're talking about ways
of **typing** z-dot and z-acute, which is interesting but not the same thing.
Z-dot, z-acute, etc are not ASCII characters, so if you're typing them, you're not typing ASCII.
>
>To clarify: an example of what I mean would be that people got together and decided
"let's represent s-acute by <s'>, z-acute by <z'>, z-dot by <x>, l-slash by <q>,...".
This sounds bizarre, but something like this did actually happen. You rapidly got used
to reading the encoded stuff, as well.
>
>What I am asking is - what *was* the exact coding used? Whatever variations it may
have started with, convergent evolution rapidly took over and there was, in the end,
only one coding that everyone used and understood. It certainly wasn't the same as the example I gave.
>
>I hope this makes things clearer. I also hope that someone remembers the answer!
>
>
>
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