Baslinux mailing list

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On Sun, 8 Jul 2007, baslinux AT lists.ibiblio.org wrote:

> Message from Steven
> ===================
> Karolis wrote:
> > > Why won't cat or less let you display upper ASCII?
> >
> > Try less -r. It should display upper ascii, but am not absolutely
> > sure.
>
> According to:  man less
> -----------------------
> There are three types of characters in the input file:
>
>  normal characters
>     can be displayed directly to the screen.
>
>  control characters
>     should  not be displayed directly, but are expected
>     to  be  found  in  ordinary  text  files  (such  as
>     backspace and tab).
>
>  binary characters
>     should  not  be  displayed  directly  and  are  not
>     expected to be found in text files.
>
> A "character set" is simply specifies which characters
> are to be considered normal, control, and binary.  The
> LESSCHARSET environment variable may be used to select
> a character set.  Possible values for LESSCHARSET are:
>
>  ascii
>     BS,  TAB,  NL, CR, and formfeed are control characters,
>     all chars with values between 32 and 126 are normal,
>     and all others are binary.
>
>  iso8859
>     Selects  an  ISO  8859  character set.  This is the
>     same as ASCII, except characters  between  160  and
>     255 are treated as normal characters.

This charset does not work with antiword - the 'e's are all missing.
koi-8 and cp866 don't include all Serbian and Macedonian characters.

So for Macedonian I had to use Windows cp1251 which is not listed here.
Nor did cp1251.f16 come with Slackware 7.1 - we designed our own (which 
looks much nicer than the iso05.f16 - and we also designed a nicer 
8859-5).  Do later linuxes accept the existence of Windows charsets?
I could not even find one for DOS.


>  latin1
>     Same as iso8859.
>
>  dos
>     Selects a character set appropriate for MS-DOS.

Which DOS charset?  cp866?

>  ebcdic
>     Selects an EBCDIC character set.
>
>  koi8-r
>     Selects a Russian character set.
>
>  utf-8
>     Selects the UTF-8 encoding of the ISO 10646
>     character set.

> Control  and  binary  characters are displayed in standout
> (reverse video).

Is there some command for changing the screen to white on black before 
capturing it?

> a normal printable character.  Otherwise, the character is
> displayed as a hex number in angle brackets.

That is the default for Macedonian characters.


If we ever get the paper feeds working on the ljet 5/6 printers I will try 
Christo's downloadable printer fonts for Cyrillic instead of printing 
screenfonts bitmapped.

Thanks, Sindi