Many computers, including the Macintosh, can display special characters that are important for communicating in Roman languages besides English (some examples: ). Unfortunately, different computers use different codes to refer to these characters. So a filename or text file that looks fine on one computer can be a garbled mess on another, unless special translation is performed.
Fetch provides the ﾒTranslate ISO Charactersﾓ option in Preferences to address this problem. When this option is enabled Fetch will translate special text characters between the Macintosh standard and the ISO 8859-1 character code. ISO 8859-1 is a standardized code set for these characters; it has been adopted by some computer manufacturers, and others support it as a "neutral ground" between incompatible codes. If Fetch is connected to one of these machines the special characters should translate perfectly.
Fetch only translates text transfers and file lists. This means that binary files (such as compressed text files) are not translated, and text files must be transfered in Text (or Automatic) mode for translation to occur.
The ISO-to-Mac and Mac-to-ISO translation tables are stored in 'taBL' resources with id 1001 and 1002, respectively. If you need to translate with a computer that uses some character set besides ISO 8859-1 you can edit these tables. The two tables should be the inverse of each other, so that an upload-download cycle results in the same file that you started with.
