Subj : UTF-8 nodelist report
To   : Nicholas Boel
From : Michiel van der Vlist
Date : Thu Mar 13 2025 06:09 pm

Hello Nicholas,

On Wednesday March 12 2025 18:48, you wrote to me:

 >> Dutch typewriters had some "dead keys" for the accents. They
 >> printed he symbol but the carriage remained in the same place, so
 >> it combined with the following letter. That is of course where de
 >> "dead key" method in my Dutch keyboard driver comes from.

 NB> So with a typewriter, you would hit a two-key combination typing the
 NB> accent/umlaut/etc and then the letter in the same place? That's pretty
 NB> neat.

Yes, that is how these dead keys work. Easy once you are used to it.

 >> In the very beginning of the computer age here it was A-Z only just
 >> like in the US. But that quickly changed, Outside the US the demand
 >> for more than just A-Z was too great to ignore. And Microsoft went
 >> along...

 NB> I would imagine. Just about everywhere outside of the US uses special
 NB> characters of some sort. MS went along because they *had* to go along,
 NB> otherwise they wouldn't have been able to continue their quest of
 NB> world domination.

Indeed. But in the beginning it was quite messy with these dozens of code pages. Full support for Unicode started with Win XP IIRC.

 >> I expect you will not run into serious problems setting it up on
 >> your end. We will see how it works out. Getting (part of) Z1 to
 >> paticipate in the UTF nodelist project would be nice. :-)

 NB> I shouldn't have any issues setting it up. I've been using the
 NB> 'allow8bit' keyword in my othernet since it was added to makenl. I'll
 NB> just have to figure out what to do with it after it is created. ;)

OK, we will stay tuned.


Cheers, Michiel

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