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Re: (meteorobs) Lat/Long
GeoZay wrote:
>For those on aol at least...if you hold down the ALT button and then hit the
>numbers 167 on the right side of your keyboard, you will get the degree
>character ...such as
The point about these fancy characters is that they're not part of the
basic ASCII character set, so even if you persuade your computer to display
them, when you use them in an email there is no guarantee that an email
recipient using another brand of computer will see them the same way.
Basically, the ASCII set includes 128 symbols, including upper and lower
case letters, the digits, the symbols you see printed on the keys of a US
keyboard and a bunch of control codes originally intended to work
teleprinters. If you want to guarantee that everyone in the world can read
your email, you have to stick to these. So no "smart" (curly) quotes,
degree signs, mathematical symbols, trademark signs and accented
characters. No UK pound signs, sadly :(.
Technical background: coding 128 characters requires 7 bits, but computers
mostly work in 8 bits, so can cope easily with a 256-character set, so the
operating system designers extended the ASCII set to include the "fancy"
characters. The trouble is, the different operating systems used different
sets of fancy characters, and different codes to represent them, despite
periodic attempts to come up with international standards.
By the way, the Internet was only designed to transmit 7-bit characters,
which is why binary files, such as programs, pictures and audio have to be
encoded to look like text files.
Hope this helps
David Cross
Keep watching the skies!