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

From: Frank da Cruz (fdc@watsun.cc.columbia.edu)
Date: Thu Feb 10 2000 - 11:07:05 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.
>
It gets worse. The encoding used almost universally in Poland is not
CP852, nor Windows Latin-2, nor anything else you might expect. It's a
home-grown PC Code Page called Mazovia, which is a version of CP437 with
minimal substitutions to represent Polish.

Bulgaria has a similar situation, but they call their code page CP856
instead of making up a name for it as the Poles did. Unfortunately, there
already is a CP856, and it ain't Bulgarian!

- Frank



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