[thelist] ASCII for fractions other than the usual ¾,½ etc

[Jackson Yee]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Jonathon Isaac Swiderski" <jswiders at cs.oberlin.edu>
To: "thelist" <thelist at lists.evolt.org>
Sent: Monday, August 19, 2002 10:36
Subject: Re: [thelist] ASCII for fractions other than the usual ¾, ½ etc


> >   I'm trying to find out what the ASCII equivalent is for the following
> > fractions:
> >   1/8
> >   5/8
>
> I don't believe these exist.  As I recall, the only ones there are are 1/4,
> 1/2, 3/4.  I don't think I've ever seen any others.

There aren't.  Even 1/2 and 1/4 are part of extended ASCII, which is not the
standard 0-127 character sequence that was originally published in 1968 as
ANSI X3.4 and have been in use since then.  Some fonts may include these
symbols in the 128-255 extended range, as Times New Roman does include the
three which you said above, but with there already not being enough space
within UTF-16 to hold the world's 170,000+ character glyphs, actually typing
out 1/2 is the best way to go.

Font glyphs, code pages, and typefaces are a huge, jumbled mess at the moment
until everyone starts using ISO 10646, as you can tell.  ;-)

Regards,
Jackson Yee
jyee at vt.edu
http://www.jacksonyee.com/