ASCII

From DPCanadaWiki

To be created/developped and updated The American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) is a code that assigns characters (letters, digits, punctuation) with numbers. These numbers can be stored in or transferred between computers or other electronic devices. ASCII has a repertoire of 128 characters (including some non-alphanumeric, unprintable control characters), which allows a single character to be stored in seven binary bits. Most computers use a byte size of eight bits and can therefore store one ASCII character per byte.

While the repertoire comprises lower-case and upper-case letters, digits, several punctuation characters, it lacks many characters that are needed in languages other than English (e.g., ä, é, ß, ζ, þ —). Even some characters used in English are missing: e.g., there is no per-mille sign "‰" and a single character has to play the role of hyphen, minus, and dash.

Still, the wide range of implementations based on the ASCII standard makes it the primal choice for e-texts as produced by DPC. Even in cases when other character sets and encodings (e.g., Latin-1 or Unicode/UTF-8) are more appropriate, an additional plain ASCII version is submitted.