(Last updated 26 Sept. 1996)
Yes this is still very much under construction; for now email me if you have a question you would like to see up here.
ASCII is also sometimes called "ISO 8859-1 (Latin-1)," and has been called culturally imperialist by some because it internationalizes a local (American) standard. What is useful about ASCII is you can see exactly how the text will be displayed on other people's systems. ASCII text is usually displayed in a monospaced font (a font in which each character takes up the same amount of space, like Monaco, Courier, or Mishawaka). This makes creating "ASCII Art" a favorite pasttime for many ASCII users, because you can draw pictures using only the characters on your keyboard.
For writing ASCII text directly, I found Windows' "Write" is easier than DOS "Edit" because you can see the whole page of text without scrolling. If it is saved as a .TXT file, it will provide the 256 character line. "Write" is therefore easiest to view an ASCII 236 character line as it wraps the line around on a single page screen. Use "Open" file and "Under list of files of type" choose "Text Files (*.txt)". These will bring a list of .txt files from the directory of your choice. It will ask you if you want to convert. Choose "no conversion." While dot matrix printers will automatically wrap the long line, lazer printers will not so that the use of "Write" -Print is almost a necessity. Using "Edit" or "Notepad" will not wrap the printing of an ASCII long line, and therefore it prints only part of that long line.An ASCII chart for Windows users can be found here; and various text editors include BBSEdit, Bedit, and Windows 95 users should useDana or QEditor. MS-DOS text editors can be found here.