Talk:NeXT character set

Concerning the characters in code points 27, 60 and A9
I am sorry but I had to revert the changes because they were either incorrect or without sense.

The article says that “it is a superset of Adobe’s PostScript” encoding. I was not sure of that but I will take the article’s word for it. If it is really an Adobe’s superset, the characters in code points 27, 60 and A9 are for sure right single quotation mark, left single quotation mark and (vertical) apostrophe. Sources that I have checked are consistent in showing this Adobe idiosyncrasy (check pages 712 and 713,, , , , check page 254, check page 23). It is not a misprint or a mistype (some text processors automatically change the vertical quotation marks and vertical apostrophe to curved ones) as one can see in the difference made with other character sets (,, , check pages 233 or 234, check pages 14 or 36).

Regarding NeXT, sources are not consistent but one must be careful with information circulating over the net. If one initial source is wrong, the subsequent information that refers to that source is also wrong. It is easy to someone disregard this slight difference when making copy/pastes of characters in code tables. It would be good if we could get sources from NeXT Documentation rather than third parties. The image in this site is of poor quality but one can still read “quoteright” at 27, “quoteleft” at 60 and “quotesingle” at A9.

Besides, having the right single quote at A9 doesn’t make sense. It would imply that it is missing one of the single quotes for quotations in languages like English (‘…’) or German (‚…‘).

Putting a midline ellipsis at BC just doesn’t make sense. It is a mathematical symbol, I can’t see the reason why NeXT would encode this mathematical symbol and not others. Besides, since it is midlined, it is not mistaken with the punctuation ellipsis.

The character at CA cannot be anything else than a diacritic. It follows the logic of putting diacritics in the C row, which is a “tradition” that comes from several character sets like DIN 31624, ISO 5426, ISO 6937/2, CCITT-T.61-1 and Adobe PostScript. Swapping between the ring diacritic and the degree sign is just plain bad typography, since they don’t take the same horizontal space and they are not at the same height.

Sources that say otherwise are probably mistaken due to visual appearance.

Code Page Guy (talk) 15:45, 25 February 2017 (UTC)