[Info-vax] character set translation for language accents

[Richard B. Gilbert]

jcwoman1963 at hotmail.com wrote:
> Here is more info.  I'm using a tcpip socket for my communications
> path.  Luckily, on the VMS side my device driver and application are
> written in Macro, so I'm able to debug and troubleshoot them to my
> heart's content.  I have a "trace" function written into the driver
> that simply copies the data it receives from the socket to my screen,
> along with a hex representation of the same data.  So I found that
> while the data is being displayed as (null, I assume), the hex appears
> to be correct.
> 
> For example, when I receive this data:
> 
> Vous répondez à une personne....
> 
> my system displays it as this:
> 
> Vous rpondez  une personne....
> 
> but the hex translation is this:
> 
> 56 6f 75 73 20 72 e9 70 6f 6e 64 65 7a 20 e0 20 75 6e 65 20 70
> 65 .....
> 
> Since it sees that first  é    as hex e9, does that mean it's not
> truncating the high order bit, or still is?  If I'm not being
> truncated, I can easily add my own translation table to make the hex
> e9 = a plain old e.  It's not ideal for language, but I think this
> customer is used to our system not having accents, so it would
> probably be more acceptable than just dropping letters out of words.

I suspect that your hardware and/or software was designed by a mono 
lingual American! ;-)  If you are receiving hex e9 but not rendering it 
as é your hardware/software simply does not know how to display it 
properly.  If the manufacturers can shave fifty cents off the price by 
not supporting accented characters that most Americans can't use or 
pronounce properly, they will!  My PC keyboard won't let me type é in 
any obvious way; I cut and pasted it!  My DEC LK-461 keyboard has a 
"Compose" key that will let me type é.