OEM codepages in Windows (was: Japanese Windows Code Page?)

From: Otto Stolz (Otto.Stolz@uni-konstanz.de)
Date: Thu Feb 10 2000 - 10:39:52 EST


Am 2000-02-08 um 22:220 h (PST) hat Chris Pratley geschrieben:
> OEM (also knows as "DOS") codepages are rarely used anymore.

Not as rarely, as you may think. E. g., I had to help a customer to read
text written in Polish (quotes from newspapers, I think), only a couple
of months ago; it turned out to be in CP 852 (DOS-Latin-2), with some
substitutions probably brought in by an ignorant person who had edited
the text in a German (DOS-Latin-1) locale with Word (pre-97 version).
Apparently, all users are not using the most recent hard- and software.

> They may (or may not - you'd have to get an NT person to confirm) be used
> in console mode on NT, but are essentially limited to legacy operations.

As it happens, I was asked by a colleague this very morning, what went
wrong with the Umlaute in one of his DOS batch files. It turned out that
the DOS window in Windows NT 4 Server is displayed in the OEM code set
via the "mode con" command, in this case CP 850. The remedy was to edit
the batch file with the Edit command (in the DOS window), rather than
with Notepad (which displays in ISO 8859-1, in our part of the world).

So, I can confirm that Windows NT 4 Server still displays this Window
in an OEM code.

Best wishes,
   Otto Stolz



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:20:58 EDT