Optimizing Performance

About ISO Latin-1 and Macintosh Character Sets

The standard Macintosh character set is know as Standard Roman. Quoting Inside Mac (Text), "It is the fundamental character set for the Macintosh computer, and is built into every Macintosh throughout the world."

The HTML standard character set is ISO Latin-1 (for Western Europe).

The standard ASCII character set is defined as decimal values 0 to 127. Both Mac Standard Roman and ISO Latin-1 use the ASCII character definitions for characters in the range 0 to 127.

Mac Standard Roman and ISO Latin-1 use different character sets for characters in the range 128-256. Some of these are the same, and some characters defined in one set are not defined in the other. The following languages use the Standard Roman character set:

        English         French          German
        Italian         Dutch           Swedish
        Spanish         Danish          Portugese
        Norwegian       Finnish         Icelandic
        Maltese         Turkish         Lithuanian
        Estonian        Latvian         Croatian

Lasso translates between Mac Standard Roman and ISO Latin-1. Characters that are not defined in both sets (for example, the bullet generated by option-8 on the Mac is not defined in ISO Latin-1) are translated to an asterisk. (Lasso uses the exact same translation tables as Netscape Navigator 3.0., which follows cross-platform conventions not followed in Netscape Navigator 2.0.) The exception is smart quotes on the Mac (which don't exist in ISO Latin-1), which Lasso translates to regular quotes.

ISO Latin-1 characters in the range 128-256 must use a special encoding scheme in HTML. This scheme is: &#xxx; (including the semi-colon), where "xxx" is the decimal code for the character. Lasso performs this encoding unless you specify the "raw" parameter in which case it does not do this encoding.

ISO Latin-1 characters in the range 128-256 must use a special encoding scheme in URLs. This scheme is: %xx where xx is a hexadecimal code for the character. Lasso performs this encoding when you specify the "URL" parameter in the field tag.

Lasso only translates and encodes characters that appear as values within FMPro database fields. It does not translate or encode characters that appear in the "raw" HTML in format files.

There are other Macintosh character sets besides Standard Roman (such as Central European and Cyrillic) than define a different set of characters for the values 128-256. Lasso will not translate these properly. There are other HTML character sets besides ISO Latin-1 (such as ISO Latin-2) that define a different set of characters for the values 128-256.

Lasso will not translate these properly.

All of the above discussion refers to one-byte character sets. There are two-byte character sets (Japanese, Chinese, Korean). Lasso does not support two-byte character sets.