Re: Special char in box?


Wed, 19 Jul 1995 10:55:35 -0400

mblaheta@flood.xnet.com (Michael Blaheta) writes:
> On 19 Jul 1995 01:57:19 GMT, Jason Dyer (jdyer@indirect.com) said:
> > I want to put an accented letter in an Inform box quote, except it
> > keeps coughing up whenever I try. Can anyone help?
>
> AFAIK you can't. Zcode does not use the ASCII standard to store text,
> it uses a 5 bit character code (as I recall), and so it simply doesn't
> have the elaborate characters available. Just letters, numbers, and
> common (i.e. on the keyboard) symbols.

There's an ascii escape (@@xxx) which you can use to get any 7-bit
character into a string. That doesn't get you accented characters,
though. I would be careful. You can probably put hi-bit characters
into your game, but they'll come out looking different on Mac, Unix,
and IBM interpreters. (I believe, looking at the source code, that
there was supposed to be some kind of mechanism to handle this problem
-- but I didn't implement it in MaxZip and XZip.)

--Z

"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the borogoves..."