OT: Page 888 (was Re: Proto-Romance)

On Wed, 24 Mar 2004 18:14:04 -0500, Ph. D. <phild@...> wrote:

> Andreas Johansson wrote:
>>
>> Subtitles are pretty common even with programmes in Swedish,
>> but that's for the benefit of people with impaired hearing.
>
> In North America, we have something called "closed captioning."
> This is subtitling which can be turned on and off. Almost all shows
> are broadcast with this. Originally a special device was attached
> to a television for this, but I believe newer televisions have it
> built-in.
> It was originally intended for the hearing impaired, but it's now
> common to see it in use in noisy places such as bars.
I have my TV set to turn on CC whenever the TV is muted. Plus, sometimes I
have a problem with spoken language, and I'll turn it on manually anyway.
It's a very good service. However, Closed Captions are *nothing* compared
to the good old "Page 888" from back in England. That used the whole gamut
of the available Teletext encoding, with common features like putting each
person's "voice" in a different color, which is sorely lacking from CCs.
It also used larger characters, that are easier to read. It was also prone
to the same signal artifacts as any other Teletext, such as a flipped bit
rendering the rest of the line as block-graphics gobbledigook. The only
common fault I've seen in CCs is that it sometimes skips two adjacent
characters. Never an odd number, always an even number.





Paul