From: mutazilah@gmail.com   
      
   In another forum (an Amiga forum), someone suggested that   
   one of the reasons why the Amiga couldn't easily replace the   
   IBM PC was because it didn't have the box-drawing characters   
   in the default character set.   
      
   This was the first time that I had ever been made aware that the   
   box drawing characters were potentially of critical importance -   
   allowing a GUI-like environment using text.   
      
   It's unclear to me why you can't reproduce that same functionality   
   using the innate graphics - I'm talking about reproducing for no   
   additional cost than the text characters would cost in development   
   time or hardware performance.   
      
   I have previously mentioned that for Vietnamese I would like   
   something like VISCII, but I want to take 6 control characters   
   that don't interfere with micro-emacs keystrokes.   
      
   To support box drawing on top of VISCII-like, I would need to   
   take even more control characters - but these can likely be   
   output-only, so there is no problem if they clash with a micro-emacs   
   keystroke.   
      
   The MSDOS 4.0 source code appears to have box-drawing characters   
   in some of the files, expressed as UTF-8. This is now difficult to edit,   
   and it was difficult to edit even before.   
      
   I think there needs to be a system where you draw your boxes using   
   just asterisks, ie:   
      
   ******   
   *        *   
   *        *   
   ******   
      
   (or whatever)   
      
   and then it is up to some software to convert your box into the proper   
   box-drawing characters on a system that supports that, or else literally   
   leaves the original asterisks.   
      
   Any thoughts on the way forward, starting at around 1983, before the   
   Amiga has debuted?   
      
   Thanks. Paul.   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)