ANSIAll fonts use a character set. A character set contains punctuation marks, numerals, uppercase and lowercase letters, and all other printable characters. The designer of a character set assigns a numeric value to each element in the set. You use this number to access an element within the set.
Most character sets used in Windows are supersets of the U.S. ASCII character set, which defines characters for the 96 numeric values from 32 to 127. There are four major groups of character sets:
ANSI
OEM
Symbol
Vendor specific
The ANSI character set is the most commonly used character set. The blank character is the first character in the ANSI character set. It has a hexadecimal value of 0x20, which is equivalent to the decimal value 32. The last character in the ANSI character set has a hexadecimal value of 0xFF, which is equivalent to the decimal value 255.
Many fonts specify a default character. Whenever a request is made for a char-acter not in the set, this default character is given. Most fonts using the ANSI character set specify the period (.) as the default character. The hexadecimal value for the period is 0x2E, or decimal 46 in the ANSI character set.
Fonts use a break character to separate words and justify text. Most fonts using the ANSI character set specify the blank character, whose hexadecimal value is 0x20, decimal 32.
Windows supports a second character set, referred to as the OEM character set. This is generally the character set used internally by DOS for screen display. Characters 32 to 127 of the OEM set are usually identical to the same characters in the U.S. ASCII set, which are also in the ANSI set. The remaining characters in the OEM set (0 to 31, and 128 to 255) correspond to the characters which may be shown on the computer's DOS display, and generally differ from ANSI characters.
The symbol character set contains special characters typically used to represent mathematical and scientific formulas.
Many printers and other output devices contain fonts based on character sets which differ from the ANSI and OEM sets, such as the EBCDIC character set. In such cases, the printer driver must translate from the ANSI character set to one or more of the sets provided by the printer or other device.