[IxDA Discuss] Bringing typography to design – High-ASCII

[Adrian Howard]

On 2 Mar 2007, at 14:58, David Cortright wrote:
[snip]
> Yes, I know they aren't base ASCII, Adrian. They are high-ASCII –  
> or extended
> ASCII <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_ASCII> – as I claimed  
> in the
> subject.

And as the wikipedia page says "The use of the term has sometimes  
been criticized, because it can be mistakenly interpreted that the  
ASCII standard has been updated to include more than 128 characters  
or that the term unambiguously identifies a single encoding, both of  
which are untrue"

I fall into that camp :-)

> And I realize that different OSes interpret ISO-8859-1 differently.
> But how many of us are really designing content for plain-text email
> messages?

<raises hand>

... and SMS messages, and ANSI terminal interfaces with only ASCII  
available, and...

> HTML entities
> <http://www.w3schools.com/tags/ref_entities.asp>will support all of
> these characters unamiguously across platforms.

It allows them to be unambiguously expressed - which is obviously  
good thing. As to whether they'll appear legibly on all platforms,  
that's a different matter.

> So let me restate the main points to the list since apparently I  
> wasn't
> clear enough the first time:
>
>    1. Additional characters exist in all of the standard fonts

True. Of course they often appear in different places in those fonts.  
Witness the incredibly common Yen symbol vs backslash problems.

>    2. Designers don't tend to use these characters because they don't
>    know about them or because they are difficult to generate using  
> a standard
>    keyboard.

Possibly :-)

>    3. A utility like the one I sent out will help you add these
>    characters to your toolbox.

Certainly.

>    4. If cross-platform is a consideration, be sure to use HTML
> entities<http://www.w3schools.com/tags/ref_entities.asp>to reference
> these characters in the final implementation.

Don't get me wrong. Typography is very important. Spending the effort  
to use typography appropriately is worth the effort.

Unfortunately I often see people assuming the presence of certain  
font faces, character sets and encodings to produce stuff that is  
completely incomprehensible for chunks of their user based that don't  
happen to be using a standard Windows box (or whatever).

Cheers,

Adrian