Utf8

You might have missed the fact, but internet globalization has changed the world behind the scenes...

Around 2000 most of the documents were either plain 7-bit-ASCII (chars 0-127: ;:'",.<>?/) perhaps using a few text-encoded characters like the euro sign or so, or using some codepage using 8-bit ASCII (0-255) allowing for a few diacritics like é â ü ß. Those parts of the world which do not use the latin alphabet but Greek, Hebrew, Cyrillic, Japanese to name a few, used to have another 'code page'. Most of the time such text was not readable on a 'normal' computer using the default code page.

Luckily there was already some standard that allows almost any character from any alphabet: unicode. Unfortunately, this 16-bit Unicode isn't compatible with 8-bit ascii. Enter utf8, a standard that allows all unicode characters, keeping all existing plain ASCII-documents around the world intact.

MusiCAD 4 allows all utf8 symbols to be used in dialogs allowing cut and paste from other sources.

To simplify entering text with diacritics you may use backslash-key-sequences. Backslash sequences will be converted to utf8 when saved.

'	aigu/acute	\'a	á
`	grave	\`a	à
:	trema/diëresis/umlaut	\:a	ä
^	circonflex	\^a	â
-	macron/bar	\-d	ð
o	ring	\oa	å
,	cedille	\,c	ç
u	breve	\ua
v	hacek/caron	\vs	š
/	slash	\/o	ø
E	ligatuur	\EA	Æ

Below you'll find a list of common diacritics and their entry.

To enter Greek or Cyrillic you need to instruct Windows to switch to an alternative keyboard layout which will map your keyboard to a Greek of Cyrillic alphabet. Do not forget to switch it back to US when editing music...

When saving files, MusiCAD will convert 8-bit ut8-codes to decimal values like: \208\152