[Info-vax] Terminal emulators, was: Re: Monitor for Alphastation 500

[Phillip Helbig undress to reply]

In article <qljag6$pop$1 at gioia.aioe.org>, =?UTF-8?Q?Arne_Vajh=c3=b8j?=
<arne at vajhoej.dk> writes: 

> On 9/14/2019 6:32 AM, hb wrote:
> > On 9/14/19 9:11 AM, Hans Vlems wrote:
> >> Michael wrote: DEC-MCS if you insist!
> >> Why did you add that comment? I use DEC-MCS in PuTTY to connect to my own VMS systems.
> >> Seems to work for me (EDT mainly and home grown programs that use SMG routines)
> > 
> > Because the character sets ISO-8859-1 and DEC-MCS differ in 5 characters
> > (which you may not have used/needed), see
> > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multinational_Character_Set. And VMS uses
> > DEC-MCS not ISO-8859-1. For example 0xf7 is the character Å“ in DEC-MCS
> > and ÷ in ISO-8859-1.
> 
> I would say that depends.
> 
> Once upon a time I guess everybody on VMS used DECMCS.
> 
> But today I would expect a lot to ISO-8859-1 (or in
> some cases -15).

There are only a few differences between MCS, 8859-1, and 8859-15.  If 
nothing is stated, usually 8859-1 is assumed, so one can write the 
corresponding MCS character and hope that it will be interpreted as the 
8859-1 character with the same encoding.  Because of the Euro sign, 
8859-15 is becoming more common.  I often type š and the recipient sees 
it as the Euro sign.

One can specify an encoding for a web page.  I have a script which takes 
ASCII text as input and translates it to the corresponding MCS 
characters corresponding to, say, Cyrillic characters.  The resulting 
file looks like gibberisch, but in a web browser it looks like any other 
Cyrillic page.