On Thu, 17 Nov 2005 17:15:32 UTC, "Peter Taylor" wrote:

"Rob Morley" wrote in message
t...
In article ,
ess says...
snip
Just pointing out that instead of typing 1.5mm^2 or 1.5(sq)mm you can type
ý
by holding down the Alt key while typing 253 on the number pad on the
right
of the keyboard like this: 1.5mmý. 252 is cubed ³, 248 is degrees ø and
171
is ?. There's lots more.

|Usenet was originally a 7-bit medium, and 8-bit characters won't display
|in software that expects text to be basic ASCII. There isn't a single
|standard for an extension to the basic ASCII set anyway, so even if
|software is 8-bit capable it won't necessarily display the character
|that the author intended.

Not that I fully understand this, but I think these Alt-xxx characters are
indeed part of the basic ASCII set. It's just that there aren't enough keys
on an English QWERTY keyboard to allot one key to every available character.
Is that not right?

No. Basic ASCII uses codes between 0 and 127 decimal. And the codes
between 0 and 31 are not 'visible'. IBM's extended ASCII puts printable
characters in the 0-31 and 128-255 spaces. Any Alt-n code, where n is
not between 32 and 127 (or 126, perhaps) is not part of basic ASCII.

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