Subj : Language Support
To   : fusion
From : Accession
Date : Sat Apr 20 2024 07:57 am

Hello Fusion,

On Sat, 20 Apr 2024 01:41:56 -0400, you wrote:

 f> DOS codepages are 100% just swapped out fonts. Although there'd be no
 f> special support for formatting messages right-to-left you could create a
 f> font and use it with Syncterm and Windows-1255 (or maybe codepage 862..
 f> not sure how prevalent that one was) and create a Hebrew theme without
 f> any special updates to Mystic itself. Works fine with Russian and many
 f> other languages too.

It also actually looks like the upper ascii characters (line and block drawing characters) are in the same locations, so using something like cp862 might not have an effect displaying ANSI, either.

The only problem is, how would you pass that on to your users? Would their client also have to be set to the same codepage in order to be able to read what is on the server?

 f> Obvsiously as you said there'd be no kludge in the message to tell
 f> others what codepage the text is in so you wouldn't want the messages to
 f> make it outside your BBS or a message net that was hebrew (or whatever)
 f> only. Traditionally that wouldn't matter because you'd have your native
 f> section of Fidonet and then whatever made it out to English-speaking
 f> Fidonet only used the ASCII part of your codepage.

Yeah, until you accidentally write something in Hebrew to the rest of the world. But it wouldn't do any real harm, as we have already seen. Some people already have to switch between Golded configurations in order to post in Russian vs. English echos, and sometimes that is forgotten. It doesn't hurt anything, really. But using a CHRS kludge indeed helps the matter quite a bit.

Regards,
Nick

.... Take my advice, I don't use it anyway.
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 * Origin: _thePharcyde distribution system (Wisconsin) (21:1/200)

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