[vdr] Re: vdr and the Euro-sign

[=?utf-8?Q?Christoph_P=C3=A4per?= <crissov@gmx.net>]

*Andreas Brugger* <brougs78@gmx.net>:
> Stefan Taferner wrote:
> > On Thursday 16 December 2004 12:38, Andreas Brugger wrote:
> >
> > > BTW, the only thing that changes with this caracter-set is, that the  
> > > Recording-Length-patch shows a weired symbol 'Ž' instead of the  
> > > minute-character '´'
That’s position 0xB4, one of the eight differences between Latin-1  
(ISO-8859-1) and Latin-9 (ISO-8859-15). The others are: 0xA4 (¤ -> €),  
0xA6 (¦ -> Š), 0xA8 (¨ -> š), 0xB8 (¸ -> ž), 0xBC (¼ -> Œ), 0xBD (½ -> œ)  
and 0xBE (¾ -> Ÿ). For German, the only possible reason for a change would  
be the euro sign.

‘´’ is neither an apostrophe nor a quote nor a minute nor a foot sign,  
it’s just a diacritic mark without a letter! That is infact pretty much  
useless without glyph combination/overlaying possibilities, which ISO-8859  
does not provide.

‘Ž’ by itself isn’t weird at all, IMO. It’s the “soft”, i.e. voiced,  
counterpart of ‘š’ in languages and transcriptions (e.g. of Cyrillic) that  
use it for the sound that is usually written ‘sh’ in English (de: ‘sch’,  
pl: ‘sz’), therefore an alternative more familiar to English eyes is ‘zh’.  
I think English (like German) doesn’t have the sound ‘ž’ usually  
represents (except maybe in dialects), but you may know it from French ‘j’  
as in ‘journal’, which is different from English ‘j’, which sounds more  
like ‘dž’. That certainly was off-topic.

> > > ... but of course that has nothing to do with the core-vdr.
Well, if VDR was Unicode inside ...

> > That is Windows codepage minute character.
There’s nothing Windows-codepage special about it, except that  
Windows-1252 is not only a superset of ISO-8859-1, but also includes all  
the glyphs of ISO-8859-15 (on different positions of course: 0x80-0x9F (Ž  
= 0x8E), which are either unused or control characters in ISO-8859) and  
some more (curly quotes mostly).

> I've just replaced the charcter with the single-quote ', because this  
> char is the same with all sets.
0x27 is indeed the correct ASCII replacement character for ′ (U+2032),  
which is the real minute and foot sign, as well as ‘ (U+2018), ’ (U+2019)  
and even ‚ (U+201A). You won’t of course get any of these with ISO-8859;  
you’d need an additional Unicode character referencing possibility (like  
HTML’s decimal and hexadecimal numeric and named character references:  
‘&#8217;’, ‘&#x2019;’, ‘&rsquo;’) or a more sophisticated character  
encoding like any UTF (which Klaus doesn’t like/want).