Printing Receipts with special characters

[Joe]

Dale,
I use a spanish keyboard that contains characters not found on a standard english language keyboard. Stock table item descriptions often contain the ñ character as it is a standard character in the Spanish language. When printing receipts or exporting the stock table, the ñ character is replaced with the * symbol. Conversely, when importing a .txt or .csv file into the stock table, the ñ character is replaced with the ± symbol. I know nothing about the difficulties of QBasic programming and I also know that this is a regional issue that 99.9% of POS users will never experience, but if you can find the time in some future update, (if it is possible?) it would be a great help for spanish language users of POS to have this corrected.

The ASCII code for ñ is alt 165.
Here is a more or less complete list of the Spanish character ASCII alt codes:

é 130
É 144
á 160
í 161
ó 162
ú 163
Ñ 164
ñ 165
ª 166
º 167
¿ 168
¡ 173

Thanks!

[Dale Harris]

Joe,

Actually the POS program does not care what ASCII character you use. It treats the upper 128 ASCII codes the same way that it treats the regular lower 128. I am sure that the it appears on the screen correctly.

However printers are a different matter. Many receipt printers will not print the upper 128 ASCII characters. While the POS program can do a lot it cannot get your printer to print characters that it cannot print.

[Joe]

Dale,

Thanks for the reply. The problem is not due to the printer. As noted in my previous post, the character change occurs when exporting the stock table to a text file (guess I wasn't very clear about that). The created text file displays the changed characters on the monitor. Conversely, if I import a .csv file into the POS stocktable, the stocktable displays changed characters on the monitor. Strange but true. I can only assume that the problem lies somewhere in POS since I am not sending the data to a printer.

[JF Mous]

Joe,

You should export the CSV file using codepage 437. I think that should work!
When viewing an exported file, you should let the program you're using (spreadsheet for example) know to use that codepage. Windows and DOS use different codepages (= ASCII char's > 128).

Hope I helped.

Grtz.

J Mous