Show OEM chars - not working

Accordig to help file:

Show OEM chars
This switches between the DOS/IBM and Windows extended character set. This is used to display characters 128 through 255. The DOS/IBM extended character set (known as OEM) contains the line draw characters found in a number of text files. Note: that this only affects the display and not how the file is saved.

In PSPad 4.5.1 (2185) it is not working with my DOS files (coded in CP-852) - i can't see linedraw characters (but polish special chars looks fine).

You are right.

Is there any chance to fix it ?

I was checking it yesterday but without any result. There is problem with unicode. In the old version wasn't problem with ANSI/OEM. But new one works in unicode and there is nothing like the OEM

I'm looking for a new editor for my job, but i must work with an old Clipper and linedrawing is part of the code - i must see it

I had simillar problem with WinMerge (very good, free program for visual text file differencing and merging) - I set codepage 852 and font for Central Europe, but Polish chars and linedrawing was corrupted. Then i discovered, that there are two versions of exe: Ansi and Unicode. Problem was with Ansi version, but with Unicode (!) everything looks fine - both Polish chars and linedrawing looks good without any additional steps

I hope you will resolve this problem some day

Hello fans of PSPad!

I came to PSPad from a post at muCommander.

I've been trying out at least a dozen text editors for Windows, including a number of «NotePad replacements,» which are not replacements at all, because not one of the alleged «NotePads» will display the line-draw characters I must have. (NotePad does display them, but only with a small few fonts. But I'm happy if ONE font displays.) Nor did even one of the other (non-NotePad wannabe-) text editors display these characters (except PSPad).

I was surprised and pleased to see PSPad display all the line-draw characters, once I checked OEM. The display is not absolutely perfect, but still I'm pleased: because when I printed, the characters reproduced flawlessly! I was ecstatic. But there is still a way to go. I'll tell what happened next, and then I'll share some links which just might fix the whole shootin'-match for PSPad to be a died-in-wool OEM-characters text editor!

I don't like to keep a lot of windows open in the MSoft OS (I'm using XP). So I saved my file, quit from PSPad and did other stuff. Later, I loaded up PSPad again (I installed to Flash Drive) and the characters which had displayed nicely (if not perfectly) did not, now, display at all. I could, however, still type in the characters (NumLock ON) the usual way with the ALT key and the NumPad keys.

So there is good news and bad news: the OEM characters display pretty well, and they print out to perfection — before, that is, you save and exit.

But there is more good news for a possible remedy. Have a look first at the posts of Brian Dessent and Charles Wilson (both on March 01, 2006) under «Re: rxvt and line-drawing characters.» See www.nabble.com . A post about rxvt is relevant to Windows because there is an rxvt [a terminal program] which runs natively in MS-Windows, and so the comment is relevant too about the font Lucida ConsoleP, which is «a TrueType font encoded for DOS codepage 437, rather than [for] ANSI.» Wilson supplies the following link to where Lucida ConsoleP can be freely downloaded: cygutils.fruitbat.org .

A very good chart for the OEM characters (=IBM code page 437=PC-8 symbol set) is to be had at www.crn.com .

Another lead is www.inp.nsk.su Dmitry Bolkhovityanov's «Unicode VGA Font,» which may not be directly useful in MS-Windows but still is grappling with much the same concerns. Dmitry's fonts are available freely under the X license (see bottom of his page). At top of the page, under What's It (his English is better than my non-existent Russian: he means, of course, What It Is), the UNI-VGA fonts are characterized this way: «Primarily intended to be the single source of fonts for [the Unix-] console and for XDosEMU» [namely for e.g. FreeDos running in Linux under DosEMU in an X-Window (such as rxvt or xterm)]. Since DosEMU runs even better in a Linux console, UNI-VGA will work there too with DosEMU: and presumably (for that matter) with anything at all running in the Unix console.

Lest eyes glaze over, this Unix-y stuff may still apply or at least give some big hints about how to lick this sucker of getting OEM fonts to run in PSPad. Please have a look at a remarkable article on the subject concerning the editor called Mined (Mined will run in Windows under Cygwin: which at least tells us that the UNI-VGA fonts can be made to play nicely (with some fiddling) on a Windows box. The article I'm talking about is this one at towo.net — Go there and click in the left-hand column under «Unicode HowTo.»

UNI-VGA is particularly remarkable because one is able to custom-pick a subset of characters from a huge world-wide set of characters and thereby tailor-make up a set which applies to this or that country, language and so on. On this point please refer to «2.1 Linux Console» in «The Unicode HowTo» by Bruno Haible (23.Jan.2001) at www.informity.com : «To work around the constraint that a VGA font can only cover 512 characters simultaneously, he [Dmitry] provides a rich Unicode font — 2279 characters, covering Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Armenian, IPA, math symbols, arrows and more — in the typical 8x16 size [together with] a script which permits [the] extract[ing] [of] any 512 characters as a [select] [Linux terminal-] console font.»

I'm hoping that developers at PSPad might be able to make use of this material and bring about an excellent OEM-characters option for the program. — I love it; I need it; I'm not alone!

Sincerely,

Roger

--
«Others Kant, but Immanuel can.»