breastle screen for HLA Adventure Need help designing one 968

JohnnyMrNinja

to a particular standard (actually, two standards, but the first version of ASCII is mostly forgotten by now) published by the American Standards buttociation. The ASCII standard uses only 7 bits for coding the characters. The picture you posted, however, had the 8th bit set in many

Now, as for the "IBM Extended ASCII" issue, anyone - even IBM - can make loose claims of enhancing the original ASCII with 8-bit characters, but no-one (to my knowledge) has ever published an official 8-bit character coding standard by that name. There are several 8-bit character coding standards that are supersets of ASCII, but there is no official "8-bit ASCII standard". "Extended ASCII" is only a vague generic term for all these standards that build upon the original ASCII - but that does not make them "ASCII" in any official sense:

You posted a picture using IBM's "Codepage 437", which is an 8-bit character set. CP437 is based on ASCII, but the 8-bit characters which you used for drawing the picture do not belong to the ASCII range (0...127), and therefore cannot be called ASCII.

Incorrect (and meaningless) correction. "ANSI" is a standards organization, not a standard in itself. :)

Only because you were incorrectly corrected. :)

"Extended ASCII" and "High ASCII" are just convenient general ways of referring to any 8-bit character set which is based on ASCII, but defines new characters in the 128...255 range. But that does not the 8-bit characters ASCII make! The distinction is there for a reason.

BTW, you could have posted the original picture with MIME headers indicating the cp437 character set. That would make it (at least theoretically) more likely that some newsreader, somewhere might be able to display the characters with a correct font on purpose, and not just accidentally. (Then again, I'm not all that optimistic about modern newsreaders having much in the way of built-in cp437 support, anyway.)

-- znark