Mhmm... Braille doesn't make much sense to have in a font, as to make it work it would need to have special paper or metal to punch dents rather than put on ink. So there's that. That or maybe glue literal bumps and let dry, which i'm sure you can do just using elmer's glue and paper, a toothpick and steady hand.

But had it been included, or a lesser set like Atascii where smaller blocks could just be used outright, then i'm sure things might have been a bit different. Though 8x8 fonts vs 8x12 and the like just makes it not quite fit the same, they'd probably have had to have 2x3 rather than 2x2 every combination of on/off to make it work.

Though i'm sure 'printed' you mean just the dot-matrix where it could do anything basically as long as you fed it the stream. Though printers in the past were very basic, and using Dot Matrix or the like anything you sent via the serial/printer port it would print (using internal fonts, a major annoyance for years til TrueType Fonts became a thing with Windows 3.1).

<snipped>

A library like aalib or the like years ago was used to do the conversion, likely how closely it could try and match the image in black and white, or contrast.

Extended ASCII would the other characters to fill the other 128 characters, which is basically system specific. Like pound, yen, and other characters.

Anything above 128 is Unicode.

Example of Ascii Art from Wikipedia

Ack. Guess my earlier part is pointless then.

JFI: That's partially correct. There are plenty of 8 bit ASCII tables - the upper half called "extended ascii" - in many variations, CP-1252 being one of them, the one we western Windows users use most often. The problem is that 256 chars are just not enough to store all characters for all languages. Batch uses ISO850. Had to export my files with that one for norwegian computers, files written in ANSI would not work because of the special characters in the user name.
Usually we only talk about these codepages when it comes to file or stream encoding, but before Unicode they were also used during runtime in programs. You would actually have ANSI characters in the memory when using a text editor.
And I am not quite sure what WIndows is using, I always have to run Unicode-Strings to a toNative-Method when I want to write it in a Buffer that will get read by C++.


Unicode is the attempt to get rid of all these different codepages. A standard set of chars was defined for 128-255, all the other chars moved to higher numbers. So the chars from 128-255 can be Unicode, but that's not necessarily the case.

ps: WIth 'printed' I mean that they actually have a defined symbol you can see. The ones from 0 to 31 do not (where 32=blank space is a symbol. In some fonts it's visible). The ones below 32 do all kinds of things, including moving the cursor around or delete characters, one of them even causes a beep (if the system is implemented accordingly). These are not printable or displayable characters, but commands.

Yeah i know. I meant to say anything over 255. Ugg during editing i missed that part. :( Though for D i did write a quick function that converts ASCII to Unicode since the language natively understands unicode, but barfs if you try to use ASCII.

Though the description of how UTF-8 works as a hack is interesting, the upper bit determines if it's ASCII or not. So

0 ??????? - normal, a text document can be UTF-8 with no changes, or no special decodes.
110 ?????
1110 ????
11110 ???

The number of 1's you have is a prefix of how many potential symbols are used; And then

10 ??????

Is the next symbol in the list, but if you read in the middle of a file, it can skip this symbol til you find the next starting symbol.

At least that's how it read in the book going over UTF-8, the actual implementation may be slightly different.

When I wrote my text reader for our resource files, I do it by trial and error. I mean, if there's a BOM, then it's obvious. But in other cases I first try to read UTF8 and if I don't find corrupt characters (certain low value chars that appear when ANSI is read as UTF8), then I keep it, otherwise I try again in ANSI. Other formats I currently don't support, this is all what our customers are using. But lately we also expanded to eastern countries, I might have to adapt it.

Seems as if we don't need help anymore to really derail the thread :D

It's all for the glory of the kingdom!

<quoting all the last posts>
Seriously, ladies and gentlemen... I come here for gaming, not for discussions similar to the ones I have at work :)

Also, I saw what you did in trying to promote a SFW game by derailing this thread.

Well, the average time difference between one nsfw release and the next is quite long, we got to work with what we have.
If there were more *cough* Bonetown *cough* ... hear that, GOG staff?