Codepage

Each Codepage held a different set of non-ASCII characters.

The Project Gutenberg FAQ 2002 Jim Tinsley

Since Microsoft Windows has no use for the control characters 128 through 159, Windows fonts commonly use Codepage 1252, which has ASCII in the first 128 characters, ISO-8859-1 in characters 160 through 255, and other symbols in the characters 128 through 159.

The Project Gutenberg FAQ 2002 Jim Tinsley

Hence, we call a text that uses non-ASCII characters in a character set like Codepage 850 or

The Project Gutenberg FAQ 2002 Jim Tinsley

For those interested, the "funny character" is character 151 (97H), and is specific to Codepage 1252 [V. 76].

The Project Gutenberg FAQ 2002 Jim Tinsley

Codepage 850 [MS-DOS] was very common; now it's rare except in some texts that have survived those ten years.

The Project Gutenberg FAQ 2002 Jim Tinsley

Some of our files produced just a few years ago using non-ASCII character sets like Codepage 850 are already giving problems for some readers.

The Project Gutenberg FAQ 2002 Jim Tinsley

And everybody accepts ASCII -- a pure ASCII file is valid ISO-8859-anything, valid Codepage-anything, and valid Unicode UTF-8.

The Project Gutenberg FAQ 2002 Jim Tinsley

Codepage 1252 and Unicode agree on the numerical values of the accented characters and symbols to be represented by the values 160 through 255.

The Project Gutenberg FAQ 2002 Jim Tinsley

Codepage 437, and later Codepage 850, were commonly used for English and some major Western European languages on MS-DOS.

The Project Gutenberg FAQ 2002 Jim Tinsley

I changed just one thing: Abbyy recognized the em-dashes as such, and output them as a special character in Codepage 1252 for em-dashes, which isn't available in ASCII, so I converted that to the PG standard

The Project Gutenberg FAQ 2002 Jim Tinsley