RE: Character substitution

>   isnt ANSI what you wordy folks call windows-1252 
> 
> No. ANSI is the American standards body that represents USA in ISO.
> Windows-1258 is a private encoding invented by some company 
> in Seattle.
> These can't be the same thing, surely.

When Microsoft first introduced Windows-1252 they referred to it as "ANSI".
I think this is because they had bought themselves a copy of ISO-8859-1, and
ISO documents purchased in the USA are rebranded by ANSI, and this was the
first document Microsoft had ever seen with "ANSI" on the cover, so they
started calling it "the ANSI specification" (thinking, presumably, that
there was only one), and then they continued calling it "ANSI" even after
they had made changes to it.

This was all a long time ago, and Microsoft have since learned better, but
only after sowing a lot of confusion among their users. I haven't seen
Windows-1252 referred to as ANSI for a while now, but the term resurfaces
from time to time.

Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/