MacToISO is still confusing me

[Martin Baxter]

On 22/12/13 20:38, Graham Samuel wrote:
> - if any old PC can display pi (the Greek letter) etc as part of its
> ability to render web pages, the why aren't these symbols available
> to all users in whatever default font is used in browsers? The
> feeling is that the PC is saying "sure, I've got them in the box, but
> I'm not letting oddballs like you access them - whatever next?"
> 

I'm not certain about this but it may be that (some?) web browsers
contain an embedded default font that they can use in case a specific
glyph is not available in the system font in use. You can occasionally
see unusual characters rendered in a web page in a clearly different
font from the surrounding text.

mactosio() is of course a product of the 8bit character set era and
remains stuck in it, but that doesn't mean that Windows OS is nowadays
still limited to single byte characters any more than the Mac is
nowadays limited only to the characters available in the venerable Mac
Roman character set.

When Livecode gets the promised transparent multibyte support, these
issues should become historic.

Martin