Subj : oopsie daisy
To   : August Abolins
From : Michiel van der Vlist
Date : Sun May 31 2020 11:55 pm

Hello August,

On Sunday May 31 2020 17:47, you wrote to me:

 MvdV>> In what way did you cheat? You have to explain. Also I am
 MvdV>> not sure what you mean by "language text". Fidonet is
 MvdV>> about text messages isn't it?

 AA> I had the impression that maybe I was venturing into forbidden
 AA> territory using glyphs instead of readable (right-side up) text chars.

I see... Let me consult the moderator... standby...

Moderator says: Topic: The UTF-8 character encoding scheme and all that comes with it.

Playing around with "funny" UTF-8 is covered by "all that comes with it", so no prob. ;-)

 MvdV>> Please elaborate...

 AA> I dunno.. I was thinking of art using UTF-8 characters.

Unlike before, we have to make the distinction between the character set and the encoding. With Morse, Baudot, EBCDIC and ASCII, there is no difference, the encoding and the character set are one and the same. But with Unicode there is a difference. Unicode uses the Universal Character Set. (UCS). Presently it covers some 144,000 characters. These are identified by a code point: U+xyzzyy where xyzzyy is a hexadecimal number up to 110000.

There is only one Unicode character set.

But there is more than one encoding. The most popular encoding method is UTF-8. There is also UTF-16 and UTF-32. Both are unsuitable for use in Fidonet because of the "NULL issue". There is UTF-7 designed for use over 7 bit channels. Mostly obsolete because 7 bit channels are mostly obsolete. Inefficient for Fidonet because Fidonet is 8 bit transparant. Even more obsure are GB18030, BOCU and SCSU.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode

 AA> Although we can't all be fluent in the many languages that can be
 AA> represented with UTF-8, maybe some artwork could turn up the notch.

We will see...


Cheers, Michiel

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