Re: About rendering ascii code in a .txt medium

In article <361...@sympatico.ca>, Pete Casso <pet...@sympatico.ca> writes:
|> Martin Atkins wrote:
|> > Pete, ASCII is at most an 8-bit character set.  There are 8 bits to every
|> > byte of a file. Therefore it is not possible to increase the ascii character
|> > set to any more bits without severly changing several things in any
|> > operating system ever invented.
|> 
|> You overlooked that ascii art requires more than just the ascii code set. Even
|> a simple text editor uses a typographical code set to render ascii art. The
|> ascii standard did not pose any limitations on using ascii code in conjunction
|> with other codes.
|> 
|> =========================================================
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And you are overlooking that, while other things than the ascii file itself are
required to view the ascii art, there are limitations on the storage format of
that ascii file;  No matter what kind of viewer you use, the underlying libraries
generally expect that one character is stored in one byte.

Furthermore, while ascii might be more than just the code set, the code set is
an intrinsic part of ascii.  If you store characters in any way other than
that specified by the ascii standard [which is, as we all know, is simply a 
mapping between byte-values, numbers in the range 0x00..0x7f, and visual-glyphs,
letters which may be displayed in any font or style the viewer chooses], then it
is not ascii.

We all agree that the ascii standard says nothing about typographical codes -
it only speaks of [if a written document can be said to "speak"] what letter of
the english alphabet, or what placement character [I speak of newlines and
carriage returns here] specific bytes should be displayed as.
This means that [as an example] text being displayed in Courier font and
text being displayed in Ariel are both ascii, because the data regarding the
font is not part of the file; it is stored in the editor.  What you seem to
be missing is that if you insert special characters into the file to change
the font/style/whatever, the ascii standard will require that those octets
be interpreted as letters or placement characters.


Ben Goldberg
--
The first rule of intelligent tinkering is to save all the parts.
- Paul Erlich
-- 
Ben Goldberg
--
The first rule of intelligent tinkering is to save all the parts.
- Paul Erlich

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