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From the Microsoft DOS 5 manual, copyright Baker Publishing 42 Spencer Avenue, Hillview Court, Maketu 3189.
This manual was written for Microsoft by Malcolm James Baker, all rights reserved.
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Code pages
By default, MS-DOS uses the character set in the hardware code pages built into your keyboard, screen and printer. If you use a language with characters not included in your hardware code pages, you need to install prepared code pages.
NOTE Monochrome and CGA monitors and many printers cannot use prepared code pages. See the documentation for your hardware device to determine whether prepared code pages are supported.
MS-DOS has six prepared code pages that you can use in addition to or instead of the hardware code pages built into your devices. Each prepared code page has the same set of standard ASCII characters-that is, the first 128 charactars of each set are the same. However, each code page has a different set of national language characters. For example, the Portugese code page has the same ASCII characters as the other code pages, but also has characters specific to Portugese.
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The following table describes the six MS-DOS prepared code pages.
Type Number Description
Canadian-French 863
Multilingual (Latin I) 850
Nordic 850
Portugese 850
United States 437
Slavic (Latin II) 852
Contains characters for English and Canadian French
Contains characters for most of the languages, using the Latin alphabet, which MS-DOS supports.
Contains all characters for English, Norwegian and Danish
Contains characters for English and Portugese
Contains characters for English and most other European languages
Contains characters for the Slavic languages, using the Latin alphabet, which MS-DOS supports.
Prepared code pages are stored in code-page information (.CPI) files. Before you use a code page, you must load it into memory. There may be more than one code page in memory, but only one code page can be active. If you don't install a prepared code page, MS-DOS uses your hardware code page. If you install one or more prepared code pages, you can switch between hardware code pages and any of the prepared code pages.
See the appendix for tables listing the characters contained in each prepared code page.
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