Glossary for Geospatial Science

high-order characters:  Characters in a computer’s 8-bit character set above the standard 128 ASCII characters.  High-order characters (also called “extended” characters) are numbered 128-255, and most PC’s use the IBM extended character encoding scheme (also called the PC-8 character encoding scheme) for screen display of the high-order characters.

The mapping of the high-order characters to the text-mode character encoding scheme of a particular printer is not standard.  In order to see what characters a printer provides for the high-order characters, consult the printer’s documentation or generate your own test page.  In some application software, in order to get a printer to generate a particular character, you may have to use a different character on the screen.