[HECnet] Non ASCII fonts on VMS?

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2013-09-28 11:45, Sampsa Laine wrote:
On 28 Sep 2013, at 11:39, Johnny Billquist <bqt at softjar.se
<mailto:bqt at softjar.se>> wrote:

On 2013-09-28 11:33, Sampsa Laine wrote:
If I type the document locally and upload it via Kermit, it sort of
works.

Unfortunately it doesn't keep the ligatures which makes it more or
less useless for Arabic :)

How do you verify that it "works"? What does the document look like on
the Mac? I mean, if you really look at all the bytes. What did you use
to create it?


The letters are all there, but they're not correctly connected
(ligatures) - again, probably a Terminal.app problem, VMS is storing
them just fine.

That could be a question of fixed font width. Would they look ok if you types the same file in Terminal.app but running locally on the Mac?

I've attached two PNGs - what the correctly formatted Arabic should look
like and how Terminal.app displays it. But yeah, I don't think this is a
VMS issue, it seems to happily accept any script thrown at it :)

Even though do (to my eyes) look more like a problem with fixed width fonts, I would be very careful about what to expect when you are dealing with something coded in UTF-8 on VMS, as VMS do not really know about UTF-8, and might in fact interpret and handle your output in ways you might not want.

It would work for Hebrew though

You will most likely have similar issues with any document using any
characters beyond ASCII, since I bet you have a UTF-8 encoded Unicode
text on the Mac.


In Hebrew there are no ligatures so as long as the letters made it,
Terminal.app can't mess it up :)

No, but VMS still can.

	Johnny

-- 
Johnny Billquist                                   || "I'm on a bus
                                                                  ||   on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt at softjar.se                         ||   Reading murder books
pdp is alive!                                         ||   tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol