Re: What character is the "-" in DataPerfect?

Hi Victor,

This is one of those times that it might not be as simple as it seems. 
According to the WordPerfect 5.1 Developer Toolkit, the codes for the 
Hyphen/Hard Hypen & Soft Hyphen are different depending on their context.

If you are working in WorkPerfect 5.1, you can enter three types of 
Hyphens... a normal Hyphen Character, Hard Hyphen Home,- and the less 
frequently used Soft Hyphen CTRL -

The ambuguity occurs because hyphens are used as word separators and also as 
line continuation. If you check the WP5.1 help for Hyphen you will see the 
examples,

eg father-in-law with normal hyphens, in the middle of a line is printed as 
father-in-law  but this hyphen also permits it to be broken at the end of a 
line as in
   father-in-
   law

The hard hyphen Home,Hyphen always displays the hyphen character but permits 
the word group from being broken at the end of the line, and will take the 
"father-in-law" down to a new line or new page.

The soft hyphen CTRL - doesn't display in the middle of a line, but allows 
the word to be broken at the end of a line so if you used it in the above 
example you might see this
   fatherin-
   law
ie no hyphen displayed between the "father" and "in".

WordPerfect has fine control on hyphenation, by allowing you to turn end of 
line hyphenation on or off (except Soft-Hyphens which always hyphenate when 
at the end of a line), and also allows you to specify the percentage of the 
line where automatic line hyphenation takes effect, ie  the degree of 
hyphenation that will occur in a document.

WordPerfect dynamically changes the single byte code depending on where a 
hyphen is, so a Hard-Hyphen-In-a-Line is 0xA9 a 
Hard-Hyphen-at-the-end-of-a-line is 0xAA, and at the end of a page 0xAB.   A 
SoftHyphenInALine is 0xAC, at the end of the line is 0xAD at the end of a 
page is 0xAE.

Fortunately WordPerfect is pretty good at finxing those things up, so if you 
a Text file containing the 0xA9 character it will work out if it needs to 
change it to one of the other codes.

The Hard Space and normal Space are not as complex...  the code for the Hard 
Space is 0xA0... which is the same byte character as HTML's non-breaking 
space     The way reveal codes works and similarity of codes such as 
Soft-Hyphen ­ 0xAD, Hard Space one might be forgiven for thinking that 
Tim Berners-Lee and others had WordPerfect in mind when defining HTML. Or 
perhaps he didn;t otherwise with a hyphenated name he would have thought 
more about the hard hyphen issue.

Brian


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Tim Rude" <timrude-PkbjNfxxIARBDgjK7y7TUQ@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: "DataPerfect Users Discussion Group" 
<dataperf-Ii8YPGKeNuMyuW1uK6fEew@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Thursday, August 24, 2006 12:09 AM
Subject: Re: [Dataperf] What character is the "-" in DataPerfect?


> Try pressing Home and then - in WP. As you'll see in Reveal Codes, this
> produces a '-' character rather than a [Hyphen] code.
>
> Tim Rude
>
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "Victor Warner" <vwarner-0bo+QMkBU69BDgjK7y7TUQ@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> To: "DataPerfect Users Discussion Group" 
> <dataperf-Ii8YPGKeNuMyuW1uK6fEew@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Sent: Wednesday, August 23, 2006 4:33 AM
> Subject: [Dataperf] What character is the "-" in DataPerfect?
>
>
> > When I enter data such as "sub-licensee" and then print out a report 
> > which
> > contains the "-" I cannot relate the "-" to any character in the
> > WordPerfect character sets. Entering "-" in WordPerfect 5.1 or 6.2
> > produces a hyphen (looking at reveal codes) (even if entered in as
> Alt-45).
> > Doing a search for a word which contains the "-" which has been entered 
> > in
> > DataPerfect means that the search will fail (unless I copy the "-"
> > character in DataPerfect into the search).
> >
> > But I would like to know what the code number so that I can enter it in
> > directly in WordPerfect.
> >
> > I would be grateful for help with this.
> >
> > Victor Warner
> > _______________________________________________
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> > http://lists.dataperfect.nl/mailman/listinfo/dataperf
>
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