Sandbox

This is a sandbox, where anyone can test. The other editable special page is Public talk. Feel free to add a link to editable special pages in your or talk page. Therefore things that seem or are non-sensical to other or all people are allowed.

All uppercase was what was used in some machines in the past, as only 64 characters (6 bits) were encoded, instead of 128 (7 bits) that ASCII uses. You can see this as something like 20 to 5F below, as opposed to 00 to 7F:

The 00 to 1F and 7F are control characters, and are used for things like new line (enter key) and tab. 80 to FF was used in 8-bit encodings for different sets of foreign language letters and symbols. Here is one for Western European (CP-1252), which is used by Custom Font. AD is like minus but only appears at the end of lines, which is typographical. A0 is no-break space, so that words next to it will stay on one line. 81, 8D, 8F, 90 and 9D are undefined.

Custom Font replaced some characters in above with math symbols.

Some machines didn't use 8-bit, instead, they replaced some of the characters with foreign letters (ISO 646). Here is an example for French:

This one includes more letters:

Due to a French reform making the letter é more frequent, î is sometimes replaced by É. There are similar character sets for many languages.

However, for closed caption decoders, the character set is different. The anomalies are in bold. 11 is placed before 30 to 3F for different sets of foreign language letters and symbols.

Special characters (11xx). 39 is a non-breaking space.

Custom Font replaced 00 with a full space, and 1E with a subscript exponent symbol.

Comparison of Terminus and Custom Font at 6x12 size: http://i. imgur.com/gVCYiQf.png

Note: The full space (█) is in the null character (00) in Custom Font, not shown. This is used as non-existent character symbol by Windows, so this hack allows to use this character.

But what about TVs?
All uppercase letters are used in captioning because older decoders couldn't properly display the lowercase g, j, p, q, and y. Here they are in the 8x13 bitmap font for the Sharp 32R S60:

In contrast, here are the uppercase G, J, P, Q, and Y.

As you can see, these are a lot easier to read.

For comparison, Custom Font does it like this:

As you can see, the lowercase g, j, p, q, and y all have descenders. The handwriting form of Custom Font is 1:3 ratio, and uppercase and descender letters are double height of lowercase letters. The electronical Custom Font is actually a compressed version with 1:2 ratio (note the g is compressed, and y slightly curves).

= What about special characters? = In this case, ASCII characters are replaced...and special characters were added in the CC decoder! For example, * is displayed like this:

Also, what the original TeleCaption decoder displayed as ¼½¾, the Sharp 32R S60 showed...

It replaced quarters with registered and trademark. Only the ½ is the same.

In Custom Font, a full 8-bit encoding could be used. Only standard Windows encodings can be used in a Windows bitmap font, so Custom Font used CP-1252 as base and replaced some characters with mathematical characters (superscript, subscript, square root).

However, on the Sharp 32R S60's on-screen display, other special characters can be displayed. 3 examples:

On the on-screen display, a border appears. This is not shown here.

= Preferences = At Special:Preferences, various preferences can be set, but login is needed.


 * At Appearance section, there is option to format broken links like this#|? instead of like this . This is useful if you have trouble seeing colors or if colors are overridden.