HP 3000 Manuals

Using SNA IMF Pass Thru

Characters Spanning Rows 

When a data field spans rowson the screen, a 16-bit DBCS character may
span rows in the character data buffer.  Consequently, the first half of
the character is on one line in the rightmost column, and the second half
of the character is on the next line in the leftmost column.
Hewlett-Packard and IBM use different approaches to solving this problem.

IBM's Implementation 

The IBM PS/55 PC uses an additional (81st) column on the screen, as shown
in figure G-1.  This solution allows the PS/55 PC to display the
character on one line, with the second byte in the 81st column.  The
logical screen size is still 80 columns, so the application will not have
access to column 81.


          Figure G-1.  IBM DBCS Character Spanning Rows 

Hewlett-Packard's Implementation 

When a 16-bit character is to be displayed in column 80, Hewlett-Packard
solves the problem by putting a blank character in column 80 and
displaying the Asian character in columns 1 and 2 of the next line (see
figure G-2).  The extra blank in column 80 will be ignored by Pass Thru
when the user presses the ENTER key, so data integrity in that field will
be preserved.


          Figure G-2.  HP DBCS Character Spanning Rows 


NOTE  Hewlett-Packard's solution will cause data in the current field to
      be truncated if the current field is already full when 16-bit
      characters are moved from the previous line. 

MPE/iX 5.0 Documentation