On Mon, 6 Jan 2014, Rick Engebretson wrote: > This seems the same as "Unicode" and the technique is interesting. It is Unicode. > A while back I had to use unicode to create a simple filled box in a > tcl/tk window. It had a red foreground to look like an LED indicator. > The 4 red boxes had a glyph representation ; \u2588\u2588\u2588\u2588 > > It took quite a while to go through thousands of glyphs, just to find > what used to be (IIRC) extended ASCII. Would something like iconv would have helped get you started? I use this sometimes: iconv --from-code=ISO-8859-1 --to-code=UTF-8 I think there are different encodings of extended ASCII, including the ISO-8859-1. This works on my Ubuntu box: man iso-8859-1 Or see here: http://www.ascii-code.com/ But that is the Latin-1 set, not the box-drawing or block-elements. The term "extended ASCII" is ambiguous: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_ASCII So the problem is that there is no standard mapping from those 8-bit codes to a single character set. You might be thinking of what DOS used to do. For the DOS/Windows version, heck out the extended ASCII table at the bottom of this page: http://www.asciitable.com/ Use of unicode UTF-8 removes all ambiguity, but it doesn't use the 8-bit codes. More on those box/block characters: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block_Elements http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Box-drawing_characters Another thing that uses these characters a lot is ncurses. I don't know much about it, but I think it makes it easy to use software to draw boxes. > I would be interested in the actual programs doing this conversion. I > think the tcl interpreter script uses the "\u" to flag the unicode > example above. I would like to know more, too. I have a program called "unum" that hasn't always worked the way I want it to. You might want to look that one up, or maybe someone reading this can chime in. Mike