Hi, Alexander!  Awhile ago you wrote in a message to Ardith Hinton:   
      
   ak>  I have to say that characters sets are different around   
   ak>  the world. Number and Latin chars are the same, but when   
   ak>  you want to type acute symbols (French for instance) no   
   ak>  guarantee that the people across the pond will see them   
   ak>  correctly.   
      
      
             Uh-huh.  That's why I named the accent marks I used there....  :-)   
      
      
      
   ak>  The system works in the following way.  You send your   
   ak>  message in US/Canada OEM charset. In Russia we transform   
   ak>  your charset to KOI-8r. This Russian charset is a modified   
   ak>  American one, but we have a smaller number of specials   
   ak>  symbols because we replaced many of them with Russian   
   ak>  alphabet symbols. Therefore, some extended symbols   
   ak>  (which you see as pseudographic, acute, circumflex)   
   ak>  we see as Russian letters.   
      
      
             And when you folks type Russian letters I see fractions, upside down   
   question marks, etc.  I also see many weird & wonderful variations on the name   
   of a certain individual from Sweden regardless of where the authors come from.   
      
    Late flash:   
      
             "Speak of the devil (and he may appear)!"  Hi, Bj”rn....  ;-)   
      
      
      
   ak>  All your examples with extended characters are skipped   
   ak>  because I have problem sending back my answer.   
      
      
             Understood.  I can't help noticing, however, that in your experiment   
   with DOS test symbols you were able to use the very same characters.  I simply   
   copied the numbers you had used & got exactly the same results.  The following   
   line is one which I quoted from your original message:   
      
    ak>>     N: 130 (Hex: 82) ‚   
    AH>             e acute   
      
   You sent it to David in echomail... I understood & quoted it... you understood   
   my quote, then you successfully requoted it.  In other experiments of my own I   
   have found that a person using a character set which is incompatible with mine   
   can't quote back to me the accent marks I've used.  Hmm....  :-)   
      
      
      
   ak>  My fidonet gate ddt.demos.su goes crazy when it processes   
   ak>  such messages and refuses to send them. ;-)   
      
      
             Perhaps because of the frequency with which I used the accent marks?   
   You seem to be able to get away with using one per line....  ;-)   
      
      
      
   ak>  So, I see "e acute" as a Russian letter which looks like   
   ak>  English "B" (but sounds as "V").   
      
      
             Ah, yes.  "BoAky" (the best approximation I can easily come up with)   
   does sound pretty much like "Vodka" to me....  :-))   
      
      
      
   ak>  Using UTF-8 you can print words from all languages in   
   ak>  one message. But you must have software which supports   
   ak>  UTF-8.   
      
      
             So I gather.  It's all very well for those who are starting out from   
   scratch, and it may indeed be the wave of the future.  But I don't expect "Joe   
   Bloggs", who has had a DOS box running flawlessly in the basement for the past   
   twenty years, to feel inspired by what for him could be an extreme makeover...   
   regardless of how many other people believe his system is hopelessly outdated.   
      
             Seems to me you can use N 32-255, when necessary, in such a way that   
   everybody in Z1 & Z3 who responded to your test understood what you meant even   
   if the colours were reversed or they couldn't duplicate what they saw.  But it   
   may be too much work sometimes for what you get out of it.  I can see Cyrillic   
   characters if I switch message editors.  If only I'd known, when Dallas & were   
   beta testing timEd... timEd doesn't give us the option of using your alphabet.   
   The best alternative we've found so far doesn't allow me to quote something in   
   Russian & then ask beginner-level questions in English, unless perhaps there's   
   a toggle I don't know about which allows me to change horses in mid-stream.  I   
   often see Russians doing that, however.  Ahh!  Okay... so how would you do it?   
      
      
      
      
   --- timEd/386 1.10.y2k+   
    * Origin: Wits' End, Vancouver CANADA (1:153/716)