Posted by Bernhard Sturm on 06/01/07 13:06

Jukka K. Korpela wrote:
> Scripsit Ben C:
>
>> Various websites do say [that the em unit is] a measure of width, e.g.
>> http://www.fontfactory.com/glossary.php.
>
> There's a lot of bogus information around, and such statements are
> useful bogosity indicators. On that particular page, you can see other
> bogosity indicators as well, such as "Extended ASCII",

As I recall there is in fact an 'extended ASCII' existing. It's more
precicely described as 'high ASCII' because 'extended' could imply that
the ASCII was 'extended' from 7-bit to 8-bit at a later stage (which is
not the case).
however I used to work on old IBM machines, and on IBM PC DOS you can
use the ECS (Extended Character Set) which uses 8-bit values to refer to
the higher part of the ASCII-chart in order to map also European
characters. Again: the information about the 'extended ASCII' is not
that 'bogus' as you are calling it (otherwise you should blame IBM for
labelling it ECS, but then we would also have to blame Microsoft for
labelling their OS as 'Windows' which has nothing to do with a real
window :-).

bernhard


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