Re: encoding accents

[Ari Davidow <ari...>]

>If I have a chance I may edit the text. Can anyone tell me an easy way to 
>enter accented vowels in basic ASCII that would be legible to anyone 
>reading the above URL, so that I don't make matters worse?  (Ari?)

Strictly speaking, ASCII defines NO accents, so no accented vowels (hence 
_American_ Standard for Computer (Coded?) Information Interchange).

For the last decade, most computers built for the US market have used a 
character set twice the size of ASCII, which includes accents and accented 
characters for most Western European languages (known in the trade as "Latin 
1").

Latin 1 includes Western European accents ranging from the Icelandic thorn to 
the common e-acute in French or Spanish enye. Hungarian, as it happens, along 
with Polish, Croatian, Czech, requires accents and characters in Latin 2. (We 
won't approach the behind-the-scenes mess that is required to use Vietnamese 
and its double and triple accents here)

For your purposes, there are three solutions, from the simple to the 
technically elegant:

1. Do as you suggested later in the original message--use YIVO-like 
transliteration. This has the advantage of making pronunciation sense to 
readers more familiar with Yiddish than with Hungarian.

2. If you are using Windows 2000 or Windows XP, and using Microsoft Word, you 
can install the Hungarian language pack--it's free--and then sending the 
resultant Word document to someone else who has Word. This is relatively 
simple, if technically limiting.

3. If you want to put the results on the web, and don't want to transliterate 
(or want the actual Hungarian text in addition to transliteration) then you use 
Unicode. This leads to a host of issues, all of which will be resolved someday 
when everyone and all browsers use Unicode (hah! as if nothing else will come 
up by then). For an introduction to the problems, see 
http://accurapid.com/journal/10intlweb.htm . (For the record, I hope to migrate 
the KlezmerShack to Unicode, or at least to a Hebrew/Yiddish-useful codepage in 
the next few months. But that's not Hungarian.)

Hope this helps, or at least doesn't depress ;-)
ari


Ari Davidow
ari (at) ivritype(dot)com
list owner, jewish-music (at) shamash(dot)org
the klezmer shack: http://www.klezmershack.com/

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