11 Other micro-computer charsets

The NeXT charset, which used to be especially provided in releases of recode before 3.5, has been integrated since as one RFC 1345 table.

11.1 Apple’s Macintosh code

This charset is available in recode under the name Apple-Mac. The shortest way of specifying it in recode is ap.

The charset is aimed towards a Macintosh micro-computer from Apple. This is an eight bit code. The file is the data fork only. This charset is fairly old in recode, its tables were produced a long while ago by mere inspection of a printed chart of the Macintosh codes and glyph.

It has CR as its implied surface. This means that, if the original end of lines have to be preserved while going out of Apple-Mac, they should currently be added back through the usage of a surface on the other charset, or better, just never removed. Here are examples for both cases:

recode ap..l2/cr < input > output
recode ap/..l2 < input > output

RFC 1345 brings into recode 2 other Macintosh charsets. You can discover them by using grep over the output of ‘recode -l’:

recode -l | grep -i mac

Charsets macintosh and macintosh_ce, as well as their aliases mac and macce also have CR as their implied surface.

There are a few discrepancies between the Apple-Mac charset and the very similar RFC 1345 charset macintosh, which have not been analysed yet, so the charsets are being kept separate for now. This might change in the future, and the Apple-Mac charset might disappear. Wizards would be interested in comparing the output of these two commands:

recode -vh Apple-Mac..Latin-1
recode -vh macintosh..Latin-1

The first command use the charset prior to RFC 1345 introduction. Both methods give different recodings. These differences are annoying, the fuzziness will have to be explained and settle down one day.

As a side note, some people ask if there is a Macintosh port of the recode program. I’m not aware of any. I presume that if the tool fills a need for Macintosh users, someone will port it one of these days?

11.2 Atari ST code

This charset is available in recode under the name AtariST.

This is the character set used on the Atari ST/TT/Falcon. This is similar to IBM-PC, but differs in some details: it includes some more accented characters, the graphic characters are mostly replaced by Hebrew characters, and there is a true German sharp s different from Greek beta.

About the end-of-line conversions: the canonical end-of-line on the Atari is ‘\r\n’, but unlike IBM-PC, the OS makes no difference between text and binary input/output; it is up to the application how to interpret the data. In fact, most of the libraries that come with compilers can grok both ‘\r\n’ and ‘\n’ as end of lines. Many of the users who also have access to Unix systems prefer ‘\n’ to ease porting Unix utilities. So, for easing reversibility, recode tries to let ‘\r’ undisturbed through recodings.