Subj : Re: 1984.ws
To   : fusion
From : tenser
Date : Fri Jun 02 2023 02:05 am

On 30 May 2023 at 06:18p, fusion pondered and said...
 
 fu> kitty will not work correctly with BBS systems.

It depends on the BBS.  Using CP437 is just a convention;
nothing says that a BBS _must_ use it.  Furthermore, every
glyph in the 437 code page has a corresponding UNICODE
code point and thus a UTF-8 representation; writing a
filter to convert from CP437 to UTF-8 is fairly straight
forward.

On the other hand, the inverse is Not true.  The UNICODE
space is dramatically larger than CP437, and in general,
one cannot translate from UTF-8 to CP437 (there's no CP437
representation for, say, Pahawh Hmong script).

So UTF-8 can do everything that CP437 can do and, with the
right font, a whole lot more.  With something like the
unscii font (http://viznut.fi/unscii) you can have a very
"traditional" BBS experience with modern text encoding; it
even supports Amiga and PETSCII typefaces!

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Linux/64)
 * Origin: Agency BBS | Dunedin, New Zealand | agency.bbs.nz (21:1/101)

.