Hardware code page: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 14:50, 12 June 2016

Revision as of 14:53, 12 June 2016

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If no hardware code page(s) are specified, these drivers default either to a dummy code page number 999<ref name="Paul_2001_CPSwitchFD"/><ref name="Paul_1997_NWDOSTIP"/><ref name="Paul_2001_NWDOSTIP"/> or assume the hardware code page to be equal to the [[primary code page]] (the first codepage listed in [[COUNTRY.SYS]] files for a particular country with the country code either specified in the CONFIG.SYS [[COUNTRY (CONFIG.SYS directive)|COUNTRY]] directive or assumed to be the operating system's internal default, usually 1 (US) in Western issues of DOS).<ref name="Paul_2001_CPSwitchFD"/>

In many English-speaking countries, the primary code page is either 437 (f.e. in the US) or 850 (f.e. in the UK, Irland and Canada),<ref name="Paul_1997_NWDOSTIP"/><ref name="Paul_2001_NWDOSTIP"/> so that, without specifying a different codepage, the system would often assume one of these to be the corresponding device's default hardware code page as well.<ref name="Paul_2001_CPSwitchFD"/>

If a hardware code page does not match one of those with official code page assignments, an arbitrary number from the range 57344-61439 (E000h-EFFFh) for [[user-definable code page]]s or 65280-65533 (FF00h-FFFDh) for [[private use code page]]s could be specified per [[IBM CDRA]] to give the operating system a non-conflictive "handle" to select that code page.

[[Arabic MS-DOS|Arabic]] and [[Hebrew MS-DOS]] do not use DISPLAY.SYS and PRINTER.SYS, but provide similar facilities using [[ARABIC.COM]], [[HEBREW.COM]], and [[SK_HGC.COM]].<ref name="Paul_2002-12-04"/>