Re: lynx-dev special characters

[David Woolley]

> typing raw values in decimal on the numeric keypad.  Example: alt138
> should print e with a grave accent over it.

This will, if you are lucky, give you the 138th (really 139th) character
in your current **DOS** code page.  I suspect you are on the US and UK
CP 437 default and your correspondent is on 850 (or is it 852).

A better way is to find the corresponding CP 1252 code and put a zero
in front of the number.  CP 1252 is I think fairly universal in areas
which use the latin alphabet.  It is also a superset of the the defacto
internet character set for this area (and the de jure default for HTML).

Probably easier is to use charmap and point and click (and if you like
remember, the key sequence it suggests).  For the standard fonts, on
Win 3.1x in Europe and the Americas,  this will show the CP 1252 set;
some extra settings may be needed to get the right subset on Unicode aware
systems.

What ever you do, avoid the middle line, as whilst the remaining characters
overlap ISO 8859/1, this line contains Windows proprietory characters,
although they are often used illegally in HTML (often double illegally
as they are used in entitiy codes which font independent).

Basically you are seeing the common confusion between character sets and
font encodings, which even results in the Greek TeX utility generating
invalid HTML by switching fonts when it should be using entities or a
different document character set, but is also very common for getting
special characters into HTML.