MacToISO is still confusing me

[Graham Samuel]

In a last desperate attempt to avoid both HTML and Unicode in translating just a few key characters from Mac to PC, I'm trying to use the built-in function MacToISO, as suggested recently by Jacque Gay.

Sadly I'm having trouble. Take the Greek letter pi, often used in mathematics. There is a native Mac encoding for it, which turns out to be decimal 185. But if you do this in the LiveCode message box running on a PC:

 put MacToISO(numToChar(185))

you don't get a pi symbol. This is not a good start.

The LC dictionary says that MacToISO translates those characters whose codes are above 127 from the Mac encoding to the Windows Latin 1 character set, which I assume is always available on PCs in Europe and the US (and maybe everywhere else). When I look up this character set in Wikipedia, it does contain the odd Greek letter, but not pi. And in fact there are very few maths symbols (no 'less than or equal to' or 'greater than or equal to', for example). So a lot of stuff easily available on the Mac just isn't there on PCs. 

I hadn't expected this - am I doing something wrong? Probably, but I'd like to know what. Meanwhile, it's time for HTML, I suppose.

TIA for any clarification.

Graham