Subj : Re: Language Support
To   : Accession
From : fusion
Date : Sat Apr 20 2024 10:13 am

On 20 Apr 2024, Accession said the following...
 
 Ac> On Sat, 20 Apr 2024 01:41:56 -0400, you wrote:
 Ac> 
 Ac>  f> DOS codepages are 100% just swapped out fonts. Although there'd be no
 Ac>  f> special support for formatting messages right-to-left you could create
 Ac>  f> font and use it with Syncterm and Windows-1255 (or maybe codepage 862.
 Ac>  f> not sure how prevalent that one was) and create a Hebrew theme without
 Ac>  f> any special updates to Mystic itself. Works fine with Russian and many
 Ac>  f> other languages too.
 Ac> 
 Ac> It also actually looks like the upper ascii characters (line and block
 Ac> drawing characters) are in the same locations, so using something like
 Ac> cp862 might not have an effect displaying ANSI, either.

quite a few of them have various degrees of support for the drawing characters from the looks of it. i looked at a few just now and they seem to mostly sacrifice the characters that converge double-line to single-line line drawing.. but most ANSI art would make it through unscathed

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

for a real dos machine you would use chcp and the font itself is just overwritten in memory and any further output just works.

for a modern program (i tested this with ZOC) you still pick a unicode font, and then a codepage, so what you actually see is a unicode font, but what goes to/from the bbs is translated to codepage 862 (i usually set this to cp437 cause i actually use it :) ). i emailed myself back and forth some hebrew sample text, called back again with the same settings, and it all looked the same.

but anyways, yes, they'd have to know beforehand to use your BBS in the right codepage. (probably write it on the bbs guide web page and have it written in english when they connect.. or i guess draw the text in ansi so they can read it lol)

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A47 2021/12/25 (Windows/32)
 * Origin: cold fusion - cfbbs.net - grand rapids, mi (21:1/616)

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