Diskuse:Kód Kamenických

Hi, revising the corresponding article in the English Wikipedia I found codepoint 173 to be different: The English WP states, it is +00A7 (paragraph symbol) whereas the Czech, Slovakian and Polish WP's state, it is +00A1 (inverted exclamation mark). In fact, the contents in the English WP was changed in 2007 by an IP ([1]), before then, it said +00A1 in the English WP as well. The IP stated he would have derived the codepoint from the original screen font. It happens that I have a manual for option EPROMs for the NEC Pinwriter family in front of me, and this includes a chart of the Kamenický encoding as well. Beyond any doubt, it shows a paragraph symbol. Also, at least in this font, codepoint 225 looks more like a Greek beta than a German sharp s (ß), but this may be down to inherent ambiguities in the base codepage 437. So, either the Czech, Slovakian and Polish WP's are in error, or there were/are two slight variants of the encoding. Please try to find out and state your sources (and ideally report back to me). Thanks and greetings. --Matthiaspaul (diskuse) 22. 4. 2013, 14:19 (UTC)

Now, this is interesting. :-) I have made some experiments:

I looked into the source code version control system in our company and found the conversion table for Kamenických, committed in 2003, it has the exclamation mark at 0xAD.
Then, I ran T602 (in a DOS virtual machine), a famous historical full-screen DOS text editor. It uses the section sign.
Then, I downloaded some random DOS TSR program for Czech keyboard and encoding. It apparently uses 0xAD for the exclamation mark.
Then, I ran a different TSR, and it used the section sign.
http://ftp.muni.cz/pub/localization/charsets/cs-encodings-faq seems to list the section sign.

Given that the classical Czech typewriter keyboard has a section sign key, I would assume the character should be present in the encoding (and I see no reason why anyone would need an inverted exclamation mark in Czech texts). The inverted exclamation mark is obviously a leftover from the original CP437, so some implementations probably just left it there untouched.

And I would say the difference between beta and sharp S was completely negligible by contemporary standards, so the character could have been used for both, I guess.

So, I would say the table here should be corrected to U+00A7, possibly with a note stating that some implementation left the inverted exclamation mark there from CP437.

--Mormegil ✉ 23. 4. 2013, 09:53 (UTC)

Ahoi Petr. Thank you for your valuable research and clarification. I have incorporated this into the English WP. If you or someone else finds out more, please don't hold back.

(BTW. The English WP has some info on codepage assignments (CP867, CP895), based on my research, which is only partially covered in the Czech article. Feel free to port that information into here.)

--Matthiaspaul (diskuse) 24. 4. 2013, 00:20 (UTC)