Sinclair QL Character Set - ISO and Unicode equivalents

The table has the QDOS Character Code, a description, the textual ISO entity for that character (if any), the numeric Unicode entity for that character (if any) and the Hex code for that character in MacOS. Set your character set or document encoding to "ISO 8859-1" or "Latin-1" Anyway, view the source to see the actual code needed to render these characters.

Note: Browsers should display the same character in the ISO and the Unicode columns (if that character is supported) if both entities are given. Alternate entities are given where a QDOS character could have different uses.

Warning: Some browsers may not support all the ISO entities, so instead of seeing © you might just see © for instance.

Warning: Some browsers may not support many of the Unicode entities, so don't be alarmed to see a lot of ?'s popping up. Go to Unicode charts online to find out where characters are. My IE 4.5 decodes most of them OK.

GIF of the standard QL character set || GIF of the Minerva character set

Low Order 7 bits - Almost ASCII

0x20 Space character
0x21 !"#$%&'()*+,-./
0x30 0123456789:;<=>?
0x40 @ABCDEFGHIJKLMNO
0x50 PQRSTUVWXYZ[\]^_
0x60 £abcdefghijklmno (that's the British Pound Sterling sign. 0xA3 in Mac/Unicode - not Hash/Octothorpe (#) or the 'lb-bar' weight sign (unicode ℔))
0x70 pqrstuvwxyz{|}~© (copyright sign is 0xA9 (or &169;) in Mac/Unicode)

Notes:

Single newline character (as in Unix)
7F is DEL in ASCII, but © in QDOS
7E (tilde) has the same bitmap as the tilde accent in QDOS
60 is ` in ASCII, but £ in QDOS

9F is ` in QDOS, but varies according to OS on other platforms

High order 7 bits - International characters

Characters added in the Minerva ROM

In addition to the control code glyphs, the Minerva alters 0xB5 (reverse S underdot) to a new glyph (Q upon V). Other characters below 0xC0 are the same as the JS ROM.

Back to the ql page.