For Win 98/2000 users: S and Z Caron

I got my own computer now, woohoo!  My dad gave me his old one since he got
a semi-new one.  Granted that the monitor is 10 years old (and turns yellow
on occasion) and the computer is one of the early Pentiums and Internet runs
on a 19.2k modem (which apparently is kinda rare; most people told me they
never heard of anything between 14.4k and 28.8k).

It's free so I won't gripe and moan.  But I sure miss the 56.6k I used to
use, and I am on the verge of throwing this damn monitor out the window.
(Which would not be a good idea since my window looks out over the downtown
streets and sidewalks.)

Anyway, I put Windoze 98 on it, mainly because I could convert to VFAT32 and
get more space out of my hard drive.  (A downloadable update from
Microsoft's website enables Win 95 users to do the same.  Forgot how to get
it though.)  I doubt this computer could handle Win 2000, which is way out
of my league pricewise anyway.

Let's cut to the chase.  Between 128 and 159 (80 and 9F hex) in the 8-bit
Latin-1 code is undefined (the "twilight zone"), Windows adds a number of
16-bit extended characters; they assume two Unicode allocations in that
case.  In Western encoding, Win 3.x and 95 have had the s-caron (or
s-hacek): capital   is 138 (8A), lowercase š is 154 (9A).  The "smart
quotes", single and double, are in the range 145-148 (B1-B4).

But Win 98 (and I assume Win 2k) do one better.  Since we have s-caron, why
not z-caron?  Hey, at least you have voiceless thorn with voiced edh.  The
codes where you can get z-caron: capital Ž is 142 (8E); lowercase ž is 158
(9E).  That's s-hacek plus four.

And that's a big help.  Now one can type Farsi in Roman characters (I found
a proposed Romanization system for the language, and it's not based on
Turkish conventions either) without having to use some ugly convention for
the least-used letter _zheh_ (like z. or z^ or z' or whatever).

This is only true for Win 98/2000.  Win 95 and earlier users will only get a
dummy block, sorry.

DaW.
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