Posted by Jon At Han on September 7, 2002, at 21:38:02
In reply to Re: J. O'Nathan you are a genius (nm), posted by t a B it, ha? on September 7, 2002, at 7:26:13
Hi Tabitha :)
Wow! - Nine amazing new name-styles!
I see you've discovered how to include all those exotically accented Nordic and West Slav and Latin characters in your posts (Hey! Font Erotica - that's an interesting new idea!) before I got around to explaining to you how I made my comparatively mundane and .
Mac users can type many of them, as Cam pointed out a couple of years ago - http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20000811/msgs/43206.html - you're not the only one here who uses Search for purposes that contribute little to our understanding of psychopharmacology. For the rest of us running Windows and/or Linux it depends on the keyboard driver, but the many characters that cannot be typed can be copied and pasted from a browser window displaying another web page that contains them, like this one, or from some text editors including MS Notepad.
You've also discovered something important that I didn't expect, that Dr Bob's cgi script ignores all those sexy diacritically-marked non-English letters as well as obvious symbols like |? (no-one expects those Spanish inquisition marks!); this opens up so many possibilities that you've just turned posting name-styles into a new art form with all the potential of Anguish!
A few weeks ago, frustrated by my inability to copy and paste from this table - http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html32#charset (it's all one large .gif file!) - I wrote a simple CGI script in C which generates the following table of all the printable one-byte characters (I hope this will work!)
| 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
--+--------------------
3| ! " # $ % & '
4| ( ) * + , - . / 0 1
5| 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 : ;
6| < = > ? @ A B C D E
7| F G H I J K L M N O
8| P Q R S T U V W X Y
9| Z [ \ ] ^ _ ` a b c
10| d e f g h i j k l m
11| n o p q r s t u v w
12| x y z { | } ~
13|
14|
15|
16|
17|
18|
19|
20|
21|
22|
23|
24|
25|It looks a mess in a variable-width font so try inserting a TT tag before it and a /TT after in the HTML source [replace the guillemets and with less-than (shift-comma) and greater-than (shift-stop): one of my first posts here more than two years ago fell foul of Dr Bob's interdict on these potentially useful characters - http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20000619/msgs/38236.html - so I know better now] or you can copy and paste from Notepad which uses a fixed-width font anyway.
Characters 127 to 159, most of which Notepad displays as blocks, are still copied correctly; they are not part of standard iso-8859-1 and may vary between browsers and versions: my Netscape 4.6 doesn't recognise (142) or (158) - Slovenian z-haek.
The non-breaking space, row 16 column 0, can only be copied from Notepad: if you try to copy it from IE it turns into an ordinary space.
Another odd character is number 173, the soft hyphen, which looks like a normal hyphen in Notepad but is invisible in HTML displayed by a web-browser unless it comes immediately before a soft line-break. Its invisibility is the reason why line 17 from column 4 to the end is shifted left by one space, although it looks correctly aligned in Notepad.
This is psycho-babble with a normal hyphen and this is psychobabble with a soft hyphen and this is psychobabble with no hyphen. You can make the soft hyphen appear or vanish by changing the width of your browser window.
I'm sorry - I seem to have got carried away and written much more than you could ever have wished to know, so I'll stop now.
Jonathan (who cannot yet think of a new name to compete with any of yours).
Hmm ... the preview is almost what I intended - only the softhyphen didn't work.
poster:Jon At Han
thread:29899
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/social/20020829/msgs/30004.html