PRB: Pound (£) symbol not visible when sending text from a DOS application

ID: ZTN1010

This Zetafax technical note applies to:

• Zetafax 5 and later.

Symptoms

When faxing text created by a DOS program, all pound currency symbols (& ) appear as the symbol "o".  When the text file is viewed using a DOS editor (eg "EDIT") the symbol is displayed correctly - however, when opened with Notepad it also displays as the symbol "o".

Cause

When Zetafax faxes a text file it assumes that it contains characters from the standard Windows character set.  This can cause problems if the file was created from a DOS application, which uses non-ASCII characters (e.g. accented characters).

This is the same effect you would see when importing the same file into a Windows word-processor.  For example, if you create a file containing a Pound (currency) symbol from a DOS editor, then fax it, the Pound '£' would be replaced by the 'o' symbol.

Resolution

If you wish to send text files containing DOS pound characters, you can instruct Zetafax to allow this as a special case by adding the following line to the zfax\SYSTEM\Z-DB\SETUP.INI file in the [EPSTIFF] section:

DOSPound: YES

To use other accented characters from DOS programs you should convert the file into the Windows character set - programs like Microsoft Word give this as an option when opening a text file.

Status

This is designed behaviour.

Last updated: 4 January 2000 (GC/GW)