amiga-news.de - Incompatible Euro keymaps and fonts

27.Jan.2002
Guido Mersmann (ANF) Incompatible Euro keymaps and fonts
For the attention of everybody who produces fonts and keymaps:

Because of the introduction of the Euro some people have unfortunately got on the wrong track. The Amiga uses the Latin-8858-1 code table that allocates the Euro sign to the ASCII code 164.

This allocation is binding. All the keymaps and texts which have recently been checked in Aminet showed faults. Often the sign is allocated to code 128 as it is common in the PC world. This might be based on the assumption that a text transfer is easier in this way. Unfortunately this is not the case because special signs specific to a country must be converted anyway. Therefore it's up to the manufacturers of the conversion programs to implement the Euro sign.

This false code leads to the unwanted effect that texts on other Amiga systems cannot be read correctly and that the Amiga becomes incompatible to itself. Besides such a text is not convertible automatically.

Moreover the key combination "Alt E" should be agreed on. The symbol (@) is on the bottom right hand side of the keyboard and it is activated by pressing the "Alt" key. If you have a Win keyboard, which are the only Amiga keyboards with the Euro sign, the Euro sign is also on the bottom right hand side of the keyboard. The combination "Alt E" seems to be more logical than "Alt Shift E".

Creating texts with the Euro sign in both code positions is not desirable due to the loss of a sign on the one hand and due to the loss of transparency on the other hand since the user will not know if the used sign is really compatible.

Here are some correct programs, texts and keymaps from Aminet:

EuroHack.lha: Patches the Euro sign in the topaz 8 font on 164!
EuroConv.lha: Converts the Euro sign from the PC on the Amiga.

According to the author the font set EuroFonts.lha has already been changed to 164 although the wrong Euro is still implemented. The new archive with approximately 900 Kb is supposed to be released over the next few days. The small archive (300 Kb) isn't compatible.

Last but not least try the test which checks the compatibility of the created Euro sign:

Open a shell and enter the following lines. "EEEE" stands for one or more Euro signs.

Echo "EEEE" to t:Test
type t:test hex

As a result the value "A4" should appear for each of the Euro signs! The value "0A" should be ignored.

0000: A4A4A4A4 0A

If another value other than "A4" comes up, the keymap is incompatible.

Guido Mersmann (sd) (Translation: sr)

[News message: 27. Jan. 2002, 15:36] [Comments: 0]
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