| Code Page 437 |
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| 437 | |
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CHARACTERS The following is a table representing CP437 using the equivalent Unicode characters: DIFFERENCE FROM ASCII It is based on ASCII , with the following modifications:
The repertoire of CP437 was taken from the character set of Wang word-processing machines, according to Bill Gates in an interview with Gates and Paul Allen that in the 2nd of October 1995 edition of Fortune Magazine: : "… we were also fascinated by dedicated word processors from Wang, because we believed that general-purpose machines could do that just as well. That's why, when it came time to design the keyboard for the IBM PC, we put the funny Wang character set into the machine—you know, smiley faces and boxes and triangles and stuff. We were thinking we'd like to do a clone of Wang word-processing software someday." CP437 is inadequate for Internationalisation , as it lacks characters necessary for some languages, such as À (capital A with grave) for French, and has only a few Greek letters. Later MS-DOS character sets, such as CP850 (DOS Latin-1), CP852 (DOS Central-European) and CP737 (DOS Greek), filled the gaps for international use while still being nearly compatible with CP437 by retaining most of the box-drawing characters. All CP437 characters are in Unicode and in Microsoft's WGL4 character set, therefore in most of the fonts on Microsoft Windows , and also in the default VGA font of the Linux kernel, and the ISO 10646 fonts for X11 . Implementors of mapping tables to Unicode should note that CP437 unifies some characters that look almost the same (to the eyes of its implementors, not to the eyes of a typographer): 0xE1 is both the German sign (U+2208, ∈) and the Greek lowercase Epsilon (U+03B5, ε). In can be inserted by holding down the Alt Key and entering the character's three-digit decimal code on the Numpad . Which DOS code page is currently active can be found out by querying SEE ALSO EXTERNAL LINKS REFERENCES |
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